Pod
by Punctuator
Summary: The Outside of Your Skin Trilogy: Part One. Four survivors are homeward bound in the cramped remnants of the Icarus II. Rated, with a humble nod to the Gulag Archipelago, for violence, gore, and coarse language. Just stay sane... and keep breathing....
1. Chapter 1

**POD**

He gave it little to no thought when they started the voyage home. Then, by that time, months in space with an imperfect grip on his own identity later, he realized he couldn't remember her name. She was Pilot.

The last words Robert Capa had heard when he was still wholly himself: "COMMAND MODULE DISENGAGING. COMMAND MODULE DISENGAGING." As they didn't immediately burn alive, he assumed in a later moment of clarity that the module's shields had deployed correctly and that Pilot or the module's programming or both had managed a rough approximation of the "minimal presentation" slingshot maneuver that would take them away from the worst of the sun, using eternally charred Mercury as extra protection. But that would come later, the assumption. When they left the larger part of the _Icarus II,_ Capa was too busy splintering, Mace was unconscious, and Trey was screaming.

He would think this, too, later: living was harder.

Death can be right there, just ahead. You might see your path to it clearly, and that path might look smooth. Accomplishments fulfilled, missions achieved. Great rewards, all that. But human nature dictates one of two things: we dawdle, or we're pulled back. More often the second. See, your life isn't the project: someone else's life is. So it was with Pilot and Trey, with Capa and Mace.

To a lesser extent, with Pilot and Capa, too. But his life wasn't her project: she had saved him by coincidence, he couldn't remember that saving, and he hated both the forgetting and his savior. Not in a personal way, especially. For one thing, his opinions were as damaged as his memory and his sense of time. For another thing, deriving perhaps directly from the multi-parted first, Capa was insane.

Pilot told him in one of his lucid periods. He didn't mind, really: that, perhaps, was the one thing he found coolly factual, a relief almost: his insanity.

Other facts: the four of them: he and Trey and Mace and Pilot. Facts of her, herself: she wasn't Cassidy. Cassie, for reasons classified "official" and hence not for the ears and eyes of the mission physicist, had left Project Icarus just over two months before their departure. Pilot, who had trained as the backup pilot for the first _Icarus_ mission, had replaced her. Cassie had left with hardly a word to him. Not that she owed him words, or anything else, for that matter. A handsqueeze, a quick kiss--

"Good luck, Capa," she'd said. And she'd gone.

Pilot was a tall, longboned woman in her mid-thirties, lean, clean-featured. Hair the color of ash, kept short enough to forestall its curling. Eyes the color of deep water under a stormy sky. She had kept to herself on the voyage out, though she'd been almost everywhere, among them: she was an observer with a knack for stillness. She could share space with you without you realizing it. More than once, Capa had with surprise noted her presence at crew gatherings. It was as though she occupied a dimension just barely one over, as though hers were always the next frame in a strip of film.

Now they had for themselves the command area, which was their living space; they had a modular section of passageway that could, with minor modification, serve as a makeshift airlock. They had shielding and a means of propulsion, all of which had deployed and locked in place both through automation and during Pilot's calm ticking-through of the dying ship's endgame emergency procedures. They had food and water and air, the ability to recycle, gravity, and power. They had medical supplies and sundries. They had sensors and navigational capability.

What they didn't have was a reliable means of communication. When they were clear of the dead zone, Pilot had asked Capa to send a message to Earth, though the radio was likely useless.

"Mission accomplished. _Icarus II_ emergency configuration Earthbound. Four survivors."

He had been surprised at the sound of his voice. Then he realized: he hadn't spoken in days.

He had realized something else, too, something he could read in Pilot's hard face and Mace's injured one: half of them had died. He found himself hating himself and Pilot and Mace-- and, to a lesser extent, Trey, though Trey would soon, he was certain, be gracious enough to die while they went on with their tinned, cramped, pointless existing-- for being alive.

Pilot worked him when he was clear. She had to-- he realized it as they moved through projects-- but he hated her for that, too. And when he wasn't lucid, and he couldn't remember anything, let alone being lucid, he sensed her watching him for clarity, and he sensed himself hating that as well. If he could have spoken then, during one of those internally time-free moments, he would have told her to fuck off; if he could move during one of those moments, suspensions lasting (or so she told him) hours or days (the first one had lasted nearly a week, so he had to be experiencing "improvement" by medical standards (but more on his re-de-synchronization with time below)), he would have put her out of the airlock. Himself too.

On principle only, though. She had saved him by coincidence, and he hated her for it. But not in a personal way especially, merely in his sensing (during the periods in which he could sense (he'd taken to timing them, the periods, his periods, on the pod's one working chronometer, sometimes watching the black display, the sickly green numbers, as breathlessly as someone lost in a cave might watch the last pulsing glow of a dying flashlight)) that she'd kept him from completion. He manifested his hatred, during his lucid periods, as resentment in terms of attitude, action, speech. He treated her civilly. Nor was he suicidal. The moment of his death had simply come and gone without him. The perfect moment. He felt no need as now to seek an imperfect one with which to replace it.

She and he in his lucid periods performed the assessment of the pod. Tallied supplies, arranged for them a living space that would maximize their resources. With Mace's help, they jerry-rigged the module's-- the pod's-- navigational potential; with Trey's help, they plotted a course for home.

With help only. Mace, who had looked when he shouldn't have at something at which no human eye was meant to look without shielding, was blind. Trey, who had been badly burned across his upper torso and right shoulder and arm, spoke to them from behind a curtain of drugs. They'd been unable to boot the spoken interface from the _Icarus_: the ship's voice had died with Kaneda, Harvey, Searle, and Corazon. They had minimal systems and monitoring, and Trey would be the voice of those systems now. If he didn't die. Pilot, with the calm yet psychotic precision of an obsessive-compulsive, had measured out a scheduling of the pain medication they'd salvaged from the _Icarus_. All for Trey.

"We need him lucid," she said.

Capa watched her, the movements of the ampules like the seconds remaining to him before-- "Mace is in pain, too."

Pilot looked at him. Her eyes were dark and flat. "We need Trey more."

* * *

"You wanna spit in my eyes, man?"

Pilot was asleep. Capa took the piece of medical sponging from the ledge near Mace's head and picked his way, arachnid-slow, to the cycler. If he woke her, she'd tell him not to waste the water. What was more, he'd agree. His compassion was most active when she slept. He pressed the cloth to the base of the steel tank, where the condensation gathered. He felt the moisture on his fingertips like a memory. Then, slowly, mindful even of the sounds from his joints, he straightened and turned and took the damp bit of sponge to Mace.

"I'm here," he said to Mace's burned face.

* * *

Mace nodded. He shut his eyes, and Capa pressed the sponge to his scarred lids, first the left eye, then the right.

Mace put his fingers over Capa's, pushed the sponge more tightly into the corner of his right eye. It hurt him; he frowned. "It's like my tear ducts are fucked."

"No. It's--"

A minute later. Mace counted the seconds. A full minute later he said: "What, man? Capa?"

But Capa was gone. Mace could hear him breathing, could hear that breathing slowing to what Pilot had called "the fugue." He felt hysteria building in him. In his mind he glared it down. He felt his eyes trying to cry. His lids and sockets burned with salt and scabbing. Barely any liquid on the sponge, and Capa silent beside him, silent beyond silent and going even quieter. Like he was turning inside out with Mace beside him blind. Nothing else they could do for his eyes, "they" being Pilot and Capa, when Capa wasn't, as he was now, gone from them and himself. Mace had felt around the damage on his face: rough areas and scabs that itched and sometimes oozed-- what? Blood or pus: whatever it was, he couldn't see it. He tasted it occasionally. It tasted of salt.

He was panicking. He knocked his skull back against the bulkhead and forced himself to breathe deeply. In deep, out deep. "Fuck," he said. "Fuck it."

Quietly, one last time he said Capa's name. When Capa said nothing in return, Mace got up on his knees, took Capa by the shoulders, and sat him down on the waffled metal floor.

Then he began to wonder. He ran his hand from Capa's shoulder to his neck, then to his face. Cautiously, slowly. He felt his way up Capa's bristled hollow cheek to his eye socket. He slowed his motion, slowed it beyond caution, until his fingertip brushed Capa's lashes.

Capa's eyes were open.

"Fuck," Mace whispered.

Trey was groaning from--

Mace guessed Pilot had put him in the pod's one legitimate sleeping bay, in the alcove that acted as a rudimentary medical area. Mace she had provided with a mat and a blanket. Keep the blind man close to the floor, he thought. Smart thinking. He listened: he heard the hiss of the hypogun. A moment later Trey was quiet. A rustling as Pilot finished tending to him, then the soft thudding of her bootsoles on the deck as she left the medical bay.

Capa was still beside him. He'd tipped onto the deck. His head was on Mace's left ankle. Mace didn't mind: he needed the contact. He guessed Pilot's position in the cabin and said: "Is it dinnertime yet?"

"Not yet. Three hours. Do you want me to move him? Capa?"

"Naw. It's okay."

* * *

"-- okay: they're working."

Cloth above flesh above bone, against his cheek. His shoulder twisted under him. Capa pushed up, away from the deck, away from Mace's ankle.

"You missed breakfast," Pilot said.

Which meant he'd missed dinner, too. Capa stared at Mace, as though Mace had been the one speaking. Mace's raw lids were closed; he was breathing deeply if fitfully. Asleep.

Hunger. A realization. After his stops, his body came back to him in fits, sensations returned harshly. Capa stood-- and nearly fell. He was dizzy.

"I want my food."

House rule: you miss a meal, you miss a meal.

"No," said Pilot. "Stay awake next time."

"I could kill you," Capa said.

She was at the pod's controls. She turned in the pilot's seat and looked at him with her flat dark eyes. "You could try. Or you could wait until lunch. Or you could wait until Trey dies and take his share of the ees."

"May I have a drink?"

"Two ounces. Two ounces only," Pilot said.

He touched the liquid to his upper lip and felt in it that whole day long ago, that late cold afternoon on a beach of rounded stones, felt the wind blowing in at him and Mace over the blue-gray surface of the big lake. No land at the horizon. Just gray smooth cloud meeting that darker gray below. The meeting point, the joinder, was itself uncertain. No matter how hard he looked he

_No,_ he thought.

couldn't see where sky ended and water began, where both were gray, a deepening gray as the light failed, and the harder he looked he

_Jesus, no._

He drank the water quickly; he shook the metal cup hard, and the last drops fell, spherical, mercurial, onto his dry tongue. He was feeling it, "it" being the nothing that

He bit the back of his hand as hard as he could. The cup clattered on the deck as he fell away and into himself. The last thing he saw was Pilot, on her feet, coming closer.

"Help--"

* * *

"--me."

He was sitting; Pilot was sitting with him, holding him. Obviously she'd gone to the deck with him. Capa raised his head from her shoulder.

"Less than five minutes, that one," she said quietly. She let go of him and got up. "At least you didn't miss lunch."

* * *

At their meals, Pilot broke the e-rats for the three of them. It lent a sense of formality to the proceedings, of society, disinclined them to wolf the pasty tan slabs. Eating slowly, they'd pass time pragmatically if not sociably: they'd be less hungry if they didn't rush the food from their mouths to their stomachs.

Mace took his share of the bar and kneaded it between thumb and forefinger. Flattening it, making it seem larger than it was.

"Water," Capa said. He touched the cup to Mace's lips, held it while Mace drank.

Mace broke off a piece of ee and chewed it slowly. "You know the _Titanic_?" he asked the air.

"Yes," said Capa. "Why?"

"You know why they didn't have enough lifeboats?"

"Outdated naval regulations," said Pilot.

"No." Mace moved his head in the direction from which the cup had come; Capa held it again to his lips. Mace sipped, stopped. "More to do with common belief."

"About what?" Capa asked.

"That it was better to drown than to die of starvation and dehydration. Most people-- sailors, anyway-- they thought of lifeboats as floating coffins."

"You're saying we should have died," Pilot said.

"I'm saying we should have had a choice."

"I should have waited until you were slightly less panicked?"

"I wasn't panicking--"

"You were," Capa said. He turned to Pilot. "But he's right, you know."

"We'd've been better off?"

"Yes."

She said, very quietly: "You fucking dirty little bastard."

Capa sat back, shocked. He stared at her. "You have no idea what you're-- What I saw--"

"What you fucking _saw,_ little man? What--? The face of God--?"

"You don't understand--"

"What I understand is that I signed on to take you fools to the sun and back. And _back_. Round-fucking-trip." When she was upset, her voice tended to burr Scots: now, glaring at Capa, she picked up the accent she normally squelched and gained volume as well. "I didn't sign up to fly you and yours to some fucking epiphany. Playing to your delusions wasn't part of my orders. So you saw-- whatever the hell you saw-- your place in the grand order of things or whatever. Well, guess what? Even if you did, your place isn't _there_. We're not angels, we're not God's fucking emissaries. He doesn't want us that close to Him, and He sent us packing. We're going home, Dr. Capa. I'm taking you home, because those are my orders and because the people in control of Project Icarus failed to inform me-- terrible oversight though it might seem to you-- that I was flying a suicide mission. And because of you we have a home to go back to. Must be hard for you, but you'll have to adjust: you're still alive, and by Christ I'm going to see that you stay that way."

"Because those are your orders."

"Yes, Doctor. Now eat your fucking lunch before your brain shuts down again."

Mace chewed his bar. "You're a bitch, you know that?" he said in Pilot's general direction.

She spoke, more softly, his way: "Yes, I know that."

* * *

The inhabitants of the pod once known as _Icarus II,_ either as a blessing or as a means of reducing to slow motion their extended doom, had one recycler capable of handling only liquids. One that could handle liquids and solids. A third that could filter and recycle gases. They were in good shape that way. They had emergency rations, e-rats, ees, enough for three people for ten months. Water. Not quite enough up front, but that's where the cyclers came in.

"We can stretch the food," Pilot said.

"Not that far," Capa countered.

"There's the airlock, Doctor." She caught herself, stopped speaking, drew and released a slow deep breath. "We have the means of feeding ourselves almost indefinitely, if--"

"If--"

She hesitated, and a slight smile flickered at the corners of her mouth. "In about a week the first cultures will be ready to harvest."

"What are--"

Suddenly, from the side, Mace let out a snort. "Oh, no. I'll eat my shoes first, man--"

Pilot smiled-- abruptly, Capa found himself smiling, too, bemusedly-- and said, "You do that, Charlie Chaplin. I'm going to be a good girl and eat my--"

"Sludge. Call it what it is."

That's what it was. In a chamber at the top of the water cycler it grew: a deep greenish paste. Probiotic, full of green goodness, plant protein, and fiber. Deeply digestible. Lacking only anything approaching tolerable flavor or texture, it would fill the gaps the e-rats left in their diets. Humble, all-essential bioculture. Sludge.

The things of which they did not speak: what they wanted to eat or drink when they got home. Then home itself. There was a view forward, but they rarely looked: hard to believe the pod could move through that impenetrable blackness. Exercise programs that Mace suggested: stretching, walking in place, pushups. Bath days, courtesy of sanitary pre-moistened wipes, no-rinse shampoo. Tiny dollops of toothpaste, to be swallowed. Tooth floss, to be re-used. For the first two weeks, they were stable. Not content, but functional.

* * *

Then, in the third week, Trey worsened.

Capa stood by as Pilot peeled away the airflow dressing on Trey's right shoulder and arm.

Capa, looking, smelling, nearly gagged. "Oh, my-- Fuck."

"What--" Trey muttered. He wasn't with them, not quite. He was riding meds and infection.

His shoulder in its sticky redness was bad; his right arm was horrific. He'd caught it in a door as they evacuated: an electrical panel had shorted and exploded, and his arm had been on fire for nearly thirty seconds before Pilot pulled him free and extinguished it. What remained of its skin was char-black; his bicep and tricep had burned nearly to the bone.

Now his arm was rotting. Next to Capa, Pilot was very pale. She said to him: "Wake Mace, would you please, Robert?"

* * *

He came up out of a troubled light sleep when someone touched his shoulder.

"Mace." Capa's voice. "We need you to do something. It's Trey."

"Is he dead?"

"No. We need you to hold him."

"Why?"

"We don't have any anesthesia," said Pilot.

Trey was out of it until they were about to begin. They bound his legs; Mace pinned his upper body. He and Trey were nearly face to face. He could smell Trey's sweat, the chemical tang of cleansing wipes, the sweetish stink of rotting flesh.

Trey woke at the cold spray of disinfectant. "What's wrong?" he asked, near Mace's right ear. "Capa? Pilot-- what are you-- Mace, what's--"

Pilot's voice: "Trey, I'm sorry. Mace, hold him."

"What--?" Trey squirmed beneath him. Mace held tight to him, pressed himself into the shifting, gasping give of flesh and skin and bone.

"Sorry, man. I'm so sorry--"

"Quickly," Pilot said. "Trey, hold on."

He heard it, Mace did, as Pilot started to cut, upwards and inwards, toward Trey's shoulder cap: a wet slicing as she left skin sufficient to form a flap. "Capa, here--" she said, and there was a sound like an air drill, a whistling, a wet microscopic crunching.

That was the medical version. In his version and Trey's, the version straight from hell, Trey bucked beneath him as the scalpel bit him; he screamed and moaned. His teeth clamped on the uniform fabric over Mace's shoulder and Mace felt his skin break as Trey's muffled howls shook through him.

It came to him, a sudden clarity: _The last time he saw Pilot she'd been covered in blood. Not her own_--

Almost on cue, something warm sprayed Mace's face.

"Clamp that," Pilot panted. "Capa, goddammit--"

A metallic clattering near Mace's head. "Got it," Capa said.

Beneath Mace, Trey went limp.

"Jesus--" Capa whispered.

"Wait--" Mace lifted his head. Trey's mouth released his shoulder; Mace put his cheek near enough to Trey's lips to feel-- "He's breathing."

"Good. That's good." Pilot finished: Mace stayed in place, holding Trey, while she autostitched the wound, sealed the artery, secured the flap of skin at Trey's shoulder. "Just need to cauterize--"

An electric ticking as the cauterizer powered up. Then an odor like fat burning on metal, chemical, greasy--

"Oh, fuck--" The ticking stopped. Mace heard the cauterizer clunk onto the instrument tray. He heard Pilot as she stepped away, retching.

Capa finished for her. It took the air cycler three days to clear away the smell.


	2. Chapter 2

They became ungroomed and unshaven in unison and thus were unaware of the degree to which their appearances were altering. They introduced into the cyclers whatever they could and without thought or complaint re-ingested what the cyclers gave back. Sometimes Capa dreamed, waking or asleep, of tall glasses of clear water. He never again dreamed of the sun.

He counted to himself, worked through equations in his mind. He filled his head with numbers. He helped Pilot with Trey and Mace. He slept without realizing it; he awoke thinking he was still asleep.

* * *

Four terrible days later, after ninety-six hours in which Trey moaned and shouted and screamed at them from his delirium of pain and drugs, things went quiet. "I'll do that," Mace had heard Capa say: Trey's blood was all over the deck, all over all of them. After the surgery, Capa had toweled Mace's face for him while both of them shook, a quaking that passed between them like shared hypothermia.

"No," Pilot had said, that time later, flatly, and Mace had listened to her for what had to have been nearly three hours, scrubbing at the decking, a hypnotic rasping of the meshed cloth on metal, until Capa said "Pilot: stop," and Mace could hear plainly another sound: quiet sobbing.

Ninety-six hours. Then, finally, quiet. Trey had exhausted himself; he muttered to himself; his muttering gave way to rough snoring. He slept; Mace slept, too.

Then, an unmeasured time later, he woke. Something was wrong. He heard Capa:

"I need to leave."

"Well, you can't," Pilot replied. She was hoarse; she sounded tired.

Mace tensed. He was a fighting man by nature: he could sense violence in the air like the smell of ozone around a thunderstorm. He was tuned in on a primitive level, an acid tightening through his gut; consequently, what happened next didn't really surprise him.

He heard a thud, a grunt of pain. Pilot. His ears had told him: she and Capa were on the upper deck. Another thud, then the sound of a body hitting the deck. Then a harsh rustling and Capa, panting--

Mace shook himself. _Shit. He's raping her_--

"Capa-- Capa, no--" He scrambled toward the sound, catching his knee on the grated steps, his head on a railing.

"She has to stay quiet," Capa said evenly.

_What was he_-- "Capa, don't, man." Mace caught his temple on the sharp corner of a console. Somewhere in the blackish-purple darkness ahead of him, Pilot was wheezing and choking. Then she went quiet.

Mace's heart thudded in his chest. "Capa, what are you doing?"

"It's okay. She's okay. I just have to leave. She wouldn't let me leave."

Mace grasped the console on which he'd struck his head, pulled himself up. "Leave what--?"

No reply. Just Capa's footsteps, heading away. Then a klaxon sounded. Mace knew all the ship's warning sounds: the outer airlock door, their miserable jerry-rigged hatch with no safety overrides, was opening.

He forced himself to speak calmly: "Come on, Capa. Come on back."

"I forgot something."

"Can't go back, man. Not like that."

"I forgot--"

"You'll kill us all, Capa. You wanna kill me, man?"

"You're already dead, Mace. We all are."

"The fuck." Mace paused. _Jesus, Pilot: wake up_. "You wanna kill me, you come over here and kill me. You don't fucking flush me into space." He eased away from the console, turned directly toward the airlock. The inner door was still closed, or they'd be dead already. "Come on, you little shit. You come here, you pick up a screwdriver, and you stick it in me. I'm not dying because you opened a goddamn door."

_Wake up, Pilot_.

The air didn't explode around him, didn't lift and pitch him into the only blackness deeper than the blackness filling his eyes. He could sense Capa hesitating. The klaxon whooped on.

From directly in front of him, Capa said: "There's no screwdriver, Mace."

Mace shuddered. "Use a fucking knife, then."

"Alright."

Then came a fleshy thump, and two grunts, one of anger from Pilot and one of pain from Capa, and Capa stumbled against him. Mace had willed that part of it-- certainly he had: Pilot coming to and aborting the danger. What he hadn't willed came next: once Capa had dropped, pitching down Mace to a weakly flailing tangle of limbs on the deck, Pilot kept hitting him with-- whatever she'd picked up: a wrench, some other tool. It whisked past Mace's skull as he grabbed for her. He stepped on Capa and nearly fell; he caught Pilot clumsily in his arms and held on. He held her until her weapon fell with a metallic clang to the deck, and then he continued to hold her, and for a second she allowed it. Then she pushed away from him and went to re-seal the outer hatch. The klaxon died. He called to her: "Are you okay?"

No reply. Then his boot again bumped Capa--

"Shit."

Mace dropped to his knees, groped his way up and across Capa's chest, desperately felt his neck for a pulse. He found it: erratic but there--

And Pilot shoved him aside. Mace lost his balance, toppled onto the deck.

"The hell--"

"I'm tying him," she said, her voice shaking and harsh. "That's all."

* * *

He couldn't remember any of it. Not strangling her, not releasing the outer hatch, not Mace goading him. He told them so: he wished they believed him. But Mace was silent but alert behind his scarred lids, and Pilot was quiet. She didn't fear him; he knew that. Nor did she exactly mistrust him. She simply treated him with an extra degree of guarded contempt.

The binding helped. For a day she kept him tied hand and foot. She fed him and gave him his allotment of water; she helped him with his sanitary needs and his cleaning, much as she was helping Trey. Nothing erotic in her touch, nothing more than marginally above inorganic, in fact. On the second day she tied his hands at the front and tethered his right ankle to a railing well away from the airlock and equally distant from the pod's navigational systems. He _left_ briefly on that second day-- he knew for exactly how long because he'd been looking at the chronometer just before he fell. One hour and eleven minutes later he came to with a bruised and aching right temple (he'd hit the railing on his way down) and the vague sense that he'd come that close to dislocating his left shoulder. Pilot was watching him, coldly, from the navigational console.

"Are you alright now?" she asked.

"Yes."

She untied him. She had about her wrist the anchoring strap of the wrench with which she'd knocked him out two days earlier. His blood was still matted on the wrench's head.

Mace was sitting on the steps. She called to him: "Mace, I've untied him."

Mace turned his scarred face their way. His tracking of them was becoming more precise: obviously he was becoming more adept at distinguishing their sounds from those of the pod.

"Got it," he said. He seemed about to say something else; he frowned slightly and kept silent. He turned away.

Capa looked from him to Pilot. Her face was still; her expression said _Try something. Please_.

Capa rubbed his wrists, hating her, hating himself. "Thank you," he said quietly.

He left her before the temptation to hit her-- it was just a dust mote in the back of his mind, but it was there-- became unbearable; he crossed to the medical bay to check on Trey. Trey was breathing heavily but evenly; his left forearm lay across his chest. His eyes were half open: he was half-blinking, slowly. The bandaging over the stump at his right shoulder was clean. She was doing that correctly at any rate, the psychotic bitch.

"Trey," Capa said, softly.

Trey's breathing sped up slightly; his lips twitched-- whether in a smile or a frown, Capa couldn't tell. He said: "Hey, Capa."

"Are you in pain?"

"No." For a moment, the twitch nearly solidified into a smile. Trey focused up at him, and the smile went away. "You tell me it was necessary."

"It was necessary, Trey."

"Okay." He licked his lips. "I wanted to-- I wanted to believe her, but I didn't. Now I can. See-- I don't trust her. Do you trust her, Capa?"

"Yes." He wasn't one for touching. But Capa put his hand over Trey's. "Not planning on dying on us, are you, Trey?"

"But we _are_ dead. I heard you telling Mace."

Capa pressed his hand more firmly over Trey's knuckles. "We're not dead, Trey. I was talking off my head."

"Crazy man, huh?"

"Yes."

"Always thought so." He licked his lips again, shifted against the foam of the bunk. "You can handle navs until I'm on my feet, can't you?"

"Sure."

"Can I have a drink?"

"Yeah. Hold on."

Capa left him. Pilot didn't say a word as he went to the cycler. By the time he returned to Trey's bunk, the navigator was asleep again. Capa looked down at him, at the cup of water in his own hand. Then he looked back at Pilot. She was still watching him. Her expression was unaccusing, without challenge.

He walked back to the cycler and poured the water into the reservoir.

* * *

The gas cycler was straining. They realized it a day later: the machine was overworking for too little output. Pilot and Capa knelt by it, eyeing its gauges and readings like scholars huddling around a holy book whose translation was still open to question.

"There's not enough oxygen reaching it," she said. She cocked an eyebrow at him, as if seeking a debate.

But Capa simply said: "Which means what?"

"Which means we'll end up with about half the air we need."

"How do we fix it?"

She sat back on her haunches, her face thoughtful. "All of the emergency tanks locked in place when we broke away. One must not have unsealed. Or--"

"Or--?"

"Or it leaked," Mace called over.

Pilot briefly looked his way. She straightened. "Let's hope it's the first one."

* * *

They had two suits. One was currently not spaceworthy; the other was spaceworthy but mute. The comms on it had cooked in a burst of feedback from the _Icarus_' dying primary mainframe. Pilot, with Capa's help, twisted and struggled into the second suit-- suiting up being, even under ideal conditions, that is to say, with lifts and slings, a difficult task. As a two-person mechanically unaided job it was nearly comical.

"Jesus Christ--" -- as Mace helped blindly with the lifting of the frontplate-- "-- maybe we should just wrap you in handipatch and send you out."

Pilot said something to him from inside the helmet. Capa, watching her lips move, translated loosely: "She says, 'Thank you, but no, Mr. Mace.'"

Mace grinned for the first time in weeks.

* * *

They tested the suit's environmental systems; Mace and Capa staggered her to the outer hatch, where she stood, armed with a tether line, a torch, a cutter, and sealant while they retreated down the corridor segment, the "tube," and closed the inner hatch. While they couldn't hear her, she could hear them. Capa siphoned air from the tube back into the living area of the pod and said to her, over the comm: "Tube flushed. Green light, Pilot."

* * *

She was out with less than a full tank of air: she took just what she would need, only what they could afford to lose. Capa programmed the time on the pod's chronometer: twenty-two minutes, green numbers descending.

"There's an alarm on it, right?" Mace said.

"Yes," Capa replied.

He waited in his purple-black darkness, Mace did. He counted backwards in his head, a rocking patience of seconds. She'd have to let herself back in the outer hatch; they had control of the inner. Capa did. Mace pictured in his head the walk to the emergency module on their underbelly, the shielded square locked up against them. Four minutes out. Then six bolts, two minutes, maybe, to clear the hatch, to access the shiny tanks sub-locked inside. A second to note which of the tanks was red-lighted or no-lighted, indicating damage or depletion or-- as they hoped-- an unbroken seal between the the tank's contents and the pod's systems. Possibly six minutes for repairs. Another two minutes replacing the hatch and the bolts. Four minutes back. Then opening the outer hatch and coming inside. Repressurizing the tube: just under a minute. Then she'd be safe. They'd be safe.

He didn't realize how hard his heart was beating until the alarm sounded, a quick hard beeping from the console in front of him. He jumped; he caught himself.

"Okay, that's it," he said. "Get her inside, man."

Beside him, Capa didn't move.

"Capa--?" Mace touched his arm. No response. "This is no time to--"

Capa slumped to the deck, gone. Gone.

"Holy shit," Mace whispered. "Not now, man. Not fucking now--"

The problem-- the most immediate, terrible problem-- was that he didn't know the controls. Pilot had rigged the pressurization on the tube while Mace was not only blind but useless, shortly after they'd broken away. Further, not only did he not know how to re-air the tube, he had no way of knowing if she were actually in it. She could still be outside, or the outer hatch might still be open, and he'd do nothing but blast oxygen into the black vacuum outside.

"Capa!" he shouted, toward the floor. He fought the urge to kick; he stumbled to the inner hatch, pressed his ear to it. Stupid: if it were airless, he'd hear nothing. Which was exactly what he heard. "Capa, wake up!" he shouted again.

She could be right there, right on the other side of the inner hatch. Right there, starting to gasp as her air ran out. Inches away from oxygen, suffocating--

"Capa, God damn it--!"

"Mace--?"

Not Capa's voice. Trey's. Wavering, weak--

"Trey, can you get up? You gotta get up, man--"

"What's happening?"

"Capa's collapsed. Pilot's outside. She's out of air. We've gotta get her inside--"

"How--?"

"Green light. I'm assuming it's a green light. Oh-two-outer-tube on the primary console. Where Capa is. Jesus, man, hurry--"

He heard Trey trying to rise, heard him gasp with pain and dizziness as he lurched toward the console and Capa. Too slowly--

"Jesus, his eyes are open," Trey panted. "Mace, is he--"

"It happens like that, Trey. Never mind him. You can't help him. Gotta help Pilot. Oh-two in the tube: now."

For a moment, Trey said nothing; in that moment, Mace had an awful thought: _Why would he want to help her? She cut his fucking arm off._

But a moment later, Trey spoke: "Got it. Tube pressurizing--" -- a pause: "Green light, Mace."

Mace threw the hatch lock, stepped into the tube. Hard sterile cold, air. His boot kicked something heavy and immobile. A helmet. Pilot had fallen. She wasn't moving.

"Trey, get in here!"

* * *

It was almost like the start of a bad joke. A one-armed man, a blind man, and a suffocating woman trapped in a spacesuit. Not the way in which Trey would have chosen to re-start his life as a useful member of their tiny society.

Pilot was face-down on the deck. She couldn't right herself: bad enough that the suit weighed over a hundred pounds: worse still, she'd been out of air for over two minutes.

"We gotta flip her," Mace was saying. "I can't reach the helmet release."

Just then-- even more nightmarish or ludicrous or both-- Capa went past them, heading for the outer hatch.

For a split second, Trey thought he was hallucinating. Then he realized-- "Mace, grab-- Behind you!"

Mace threw himself up and backwards and collided with Capa. They commenced grappling there in the cramped corridor, Capa flailing for the door controls, Mace holding him back blindly.

"I have to open the door--" Capa was saying. Trey kept his eyes on Pilot, pawed underneath her for the helmet release, nearly tipped onto her.

"Fuck it, man, we're in the tube--" Mace grunted as he caught a blow; he got Capa in a bear hug. "You can't open the outer door--"

"Pilot's out there."

"Pilot's right here!" Trey shouted. He was going clammy; he felt nauseous. "God damn it, Capa--!"

Capa froze. He looked from Trey and Pilot to the outer door and back again. He stopped straining against Mace. "Jesus Christ."

He crossed to Pilot, Mace still holding on to him, and dropped to his knees.

"Gotta flip her," Mace panted. "Show me--"

Capa grabbed his hands, positioned them on the suit, got his own grip. "Okay-- now."

They grunted, lifting her. Trey sat back, out of the way. He saw, though, through the helmet's view-slit: Pilot's eyes were rolled back in her skull. Capa hit the helmet release, and Trey had his left hand in there, helping with the lifting away. Capa threw the locks on the chest panel, and the three of them pulled her clear.

"What--?" Mace gasped. "What is she--"

"She's not breathing--" Capa said.

Mace shoved him aside. He felt his way quickly, preternaturally, up her sweated, t-shirted torso; he felt his way to her face and tipped her head back and locked his mouth over hers and blew air into her. "Chest, Capa. Compressions."

Breath. Compression. Breath breath. Compression. Pilot came to with a ragged gasp. She caught Mace by the shoulders.

"I'm okay, Mace," she said to him.

"Okay," he said back.

She sat up. She looked at Trey, smiled shakily. "Hey, there."

"Hey."

Capa stood. He offered her a hand. She ignored it. She got up off the deck and punched him square in the jaw. She followed him as he stumbled backward, shocked; she bowled into him, swinging and kicking. "You fucking _bastard_--!"

A melee followed, right there in the tube. Mace grabbed randomly, missed limbs, caught blows. Someone bumped Trey's stump, and he shouted in pain.

"Stop it--!" Mace yelled. "Goddammit, stop!" He felt his way along the tube, found his way to the inner hatch, found on the pod's bulkhead a switch he knew. A light switch. He hit it.

Inside the tube, the struggling ceased. "Pilot?" Mace called.

"Y--yeah."

"Are we okay?"

A pause from the darkness outside his. He picked Pilot's panting out from Capa's and Trey's. "Yeah," she said, finally. "It was the seal. There wasn't a leak. We've got the air; we're okay."

Mace breathed out. "Guys--? Trey? Capa? You hear that? We're okay."

He switched on the lights.


	3. Chapter 3

Relative, of course, the term "okay." Capa wasn't. In the days following Pilot's trip outside, he grew quieter and quieter, more and more still. He'd failed her; he'd nearly killed all of them. Pilot did nothing to reconcile with him. Depression was taking him, and she was letting him go. Trey suffered something of a collapse after his exertion: though he helped Pilot with navigation, he spent much of his day sleeping.

Mace tried to talk to Capa. He wasn't much for this sort of thing, for counseling. Organic problems confounded him. He preferred machines. But he was a compulsive fixer, and Capa was in need of repair. So Mace stuck as near to him as propriety and the frustration levels of their confined space would allow, and he listened when Capa spoke. As Capa did one day-- three days after Pilot's spacewalk-- over their breakfast ees and water and bowls of biosludge.

"If I leave when I'm sleeping," Capa said, quietly, "I'll never come back."

Mace paused with his spoon at his lips. "How do you know what's real?"

"I don't."

Mace chewed his mouthful of sludge, frowning. "How can you stand it?"

"I, umm--" Capa's voice trailed away.

"What, man?"

"You've already asked me that."

Mace tried to suppress a shudder. "How'd you answer me?"

"You really can't remember?"

"Wrong reality, Capa."

"I said, 'I can't.'"

"Okay-- okay--" Mace set down his bowl, took a sip of water. "We have to find you-- I dunno-- a marker or something."

"A marker--?"

"Something that'll-- fuck, man, I'm not a shrink-- something that'll help you know where you are--"

"That's a good idea." Pilot. Right by his side. Mace wondered how long she'd been there. "Until we do, though, I have a question. Capa--?"

Guardedly: "Yes?"

"If you get back-- I won't patronize you by saying 'when'-- what would you do?"

Capa hesitated. "Teach, I suppose."

"What? What would you teach?"

"Don't humor me."

"I'm not humoring you." Pilot's voice was even if not warm. "I want you to tell me. Tell _us_. Teach us something."

A reconciliation of sorts. Mace smiled slightly.

* * *

Thus began their days of university. Capa taught them physics, focusing on first-year (or, as he put it, with what Mace found to be an encouraging tone of contempt, "sub-American freshman") concepts and theories. Trey, up finally from his slumbers and beginning to liberate himself from his pain meds, started them on low-level programming. Mace talked them through survival skills, self-defense, and basic engine concepts. And Pilot brought, in addition to ancient Greek literature-- which in itself was mildly incongruous-- music theory, at the announcement of which Mace indulged in not only in a snort but a smirk as well.

He turned his face her way. "Music theory? I've heard you sing, woman: you're crap."

She didn't reply immediately: he could imagine her smile. "Why they call them 'failed aspirations,' isn't it?"

Phys-ed, too: first-year uni wouldn't be complete without it. They walked the decks, alone or in pairs; sometimes, as they walked, they described where they weren't. Trey walked them through jungles and rainforest; Pilot hill-walked western Scotland; Mace, his hand on Capa's shoulder, strolled them through Chicago, New York, San Diego; with Capa, they wandered bleak and rocky shores from Australia to Michigan. Sometimes they chanted a rhythm of paces and steps; they made up lyrics for their walks. They stair-stepped, too, to keep their lungs and hearts limber: step up, step down, other leg, repeat. Pushups on the stairs, too-- for, as Trey put it, finally, the "multi-limbed among us." Lunges and crunches for all of them.

Something of a life, something of contentment, less of depression. The pod was apparently on course; the cyclers-- whose filters they cleaned carefully, reverently, their new gods in steel-- were functioning efficiently. Trey was healing. Capa, buoyed by purpose-- even if that purpose, as Mace suspected, consisted primarily of his delight in tormenting them with his superior knowledge-- suffered fewer absences, and the periods for which he was gone were briefer.

Not all of it was smooth, of course. It couldn't be. Beginning in those early months and rolling forward like a gathering of clouds on the horizon came a growing difficulty with sleeping. It caught Mace first, possibly because his nights and days were all one purplish black. He wasn't afraid of his private darkness, not any more. He could relax during his official slumber period: sometimes he simply couldn't sleep.

He lay awake one "night," Mace did-- Pilot had rigged a diurnal cycling in the pod's lighting, or so they told him-- and listened to the pod, to its inhabitants. Trey was murmuring to himself, calmly: numbers in long progressions. Capa was snoring; Mace smiled at that, what might have been an irritation bowing before the fact of its being a flaw in Brainiac, the human embodiment of wisdom. From Pilot he heard--

At first he heard nothing. He thought maybe she'd moved from her mat, which lay about four meters from his. But then he heard her muttering, very softly: it was wordless, or in words he couldn't understand.

Something in the sound of it frightened him. It was obviously making her unhappy: he caught a soft groan, almost a sob, from her. Mace left his mat, took his blanket, shifted over to her. He settled himself behind her and drew her close.

"You're here," Pilot murmured. She followed it with a name he couldn't catch. Not his. She rolled over, toward him, and laid her head against his chest. Mace held her, calmly watching the wall of shadow before his eyes.

* * *

Two days later, Mace had a waking dream about a werewolf. Waking in that he was in the pod, seeing workstations, monitors, steel decking, in that he could hear the pod's blips, the hum of the cyclers, the low whirring of the ventilation, in that he could smell the stale aridity of the air, the slight chemical funk of antiseptic, antibacterial wipes, and commingled body odor. The lighting was low, but it didn't matter: the dream wanted him to see something, and there it was:

The werewolf. Seated at the nav station.

Like a man at a zoo watching a tiger through four-inch Plexiglas, Mace through the shielding of his dream watched the werewolf. He found himself disappointed. No terrifying monster of legend, this: its skinny body was dressed as if for the mission, in blue cargo-pocket trousers and a longsleeved henley; the hair on its head was long and stringy and dark; and its facial hair had grown over its jaw and up its sunken cheeks (_cheek,_ actually, just the one: Mace was seeing the creature's right profile) in bushy fits and starts rendered all the more mangy-looking by the fact that said facial hair was a rusty reddish color bearing no relation to the color of the hair on the creature's head.

He was half tempted to laugh. Then the werewolf turned in its chair, his way if not toward him, to check something on one of the station's secondary monitors, and Mace saw its eyes.

They were a brilliant stoner psychedelic blue.

In his dream, Mace snorted. "Capa, man, you look like shit."

"Try looking in a mirror, troglodyte," replied Capa-the-werewolf, absently. A pause. He looked at Mace sharply. "You can _see_?"

"I-- Yeah." Not a dream. Mace was wide awake. He blinked; he grinned loopily as he realized it: "I can see--!"

* * *

Not that his sight, returned, was perfect. His right eye transmitted to his brain images in detail; his left eye still saw only blackish shapes, bruised shadows. Still, he was ecstatic; better, the others caught his glow. Pilot held the optometric scope before him, concentration buckling her eyebrows as she peered through it at his right retina, and he looked past the scope to her pale, thin face and thought her the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen.

His left eye he kept closed; later, Pilot helped him rig a patch for it.

"Rakish," she said, smiling at him.

Mace smiled back. "All I need now is a parrot and a bottle of rum."

His smile wavered when he finally took Capa's suggestion and looked in a mirror. The flash-fire before they'd evacuated had burned away his eyebrows, blistered his temples and forehead, the left side of his face. The blisters now were gone, of course; his eyebrows and skin were growing back. His beard had grown in, too: they couldn't spare the water for shaving. But the bare patches of skin on his face were vaguely monstrous: he looked not unlike a being carved from sandstone.

Trey was the one to catch him looking. He put his arm around Mace's shoulders. "You look fine, buddy."

"Maybe I'll have it power-sanded, huh?"

"Same time as I get my bionic arm."

Mace smiled. "It's a date."

* * *

They shared time at the pod's controls, the four of them, to sharpen and retain their skills as a flight team. Mace and Pilot concentrated on restoring the ship's communications; Trey and Capa focused on programming workable diagnostics for the pod's navigational systems. Pilot suggested that they maintain open and frank communication amongst themselves-- to that end, she'd announced that the pod's log was unencrypted and fully open to contributions from one and all-- and so Mace asked Capa one day, bluntly, while they were all on-station:

"So what do you see when you go, man?"

"When I--"

"When you shut down: what do you see?"

Capa hesitated. "I see the sun. I see my death. I see myself, Mace. Walking into it. It engulfs me; it's everywhere. Light. I _am_ light."

Mace frowned. "So you're dead, then."

"Yes."

Trey spoke, slowly: "So then we all are."

"That's my theory."

Asked Mace, with possibly less-than-perfect philosophical tact: "Then why the hell are we stuck in a goddamn tin can eating green sludge?"

"I couldn't tell you."

"Didn't they--" Mace looked over at Pilot. "Pilot, you're Catholic, aren't you?"

"Yep."

"Didn't they cancel Purgatory?"

"About sixty years ago, yeah."

Mace looked over his shoulder at Capa. "So I think you're wrong, man."

"Just because we're not in what you'd consider heaven--"

"Hell," Trey said. "This'd have to be some upper level of hell, wouldn't it?"

Capa shook his shaggy head. "You can't base it on religious tenets. This could be a millisecond--"

"In your head," Mace said.

"While you blink out," Trey added.

"The millisecond-- billisecond-- in which I cease to exist, yes."

"So-- in your billisecond--" Pilot began.

"Billisecond, my ass. He'll be wanting his own Big Bang next," Trey muttered, possibly wording his way around a residue of pain meds.

"-- the best you could come up with is us trapped in a can eating green sludge," Pilot finished.

Capa threw her a shocking-blue glare. "It's not up to me."

"Whoever it's up to -- Okay: _whatever_ it's up to, it's bullshit," Mace said. "I'm not dead."

"If it were me blinking out, we'd have steak," Trey said. "Goddamn hippie vegetarian."

Pilot, hiding a smile between her lips and teeth, turned back to the controls. "Amen to that. How's our course holding, Capa?"

He didn't reply.

"Robert-- are you here?" Pilot asked evenly.

"Yes, I'm here." He was very quiet. Angry-quiet.

"I'm sorry I called you a goddamn hippie vegetarian," Trey said.

"I _am_ a goddamn hippie vegetarian."

"I'm sorry anyway."

"No problem."

"But I'm still not dead," Mace countered.

Capa softly growled out a breath. "All a matter of perspective, isn't it, Mace?"

"Me being one-eyed, that doesn't say much, does it?"

"No."

"Mace. Capa." Pilot spoke sharply. "Both of you: focus. Is our course holding, Robert?"

"Yes. Calculations check. Course locked and holding."

"Thank you. And thank _you_, Mr. Trey."

Trey looked puzzled. "What for?"

"Because now we're thinking about steak, you dick," said Mace.

Capa looked smug.

* * *

Two weeks later, toward the end of their fifth month, came Capa's birthday. The four of them having grown adept at carving personal pockets of privacy within their shared confines, the three whose birthday it wasn't had collected bits of scrap metal and plastic, and a spare square of subdecking tile roughly half a meter on a side, and with files and utility knives from the tool cabinet (as well as with a certain amount of debate regarding style, the alternating count of checkered squares light and dark) had fashioned for Capa a chess set.

They set it up at the center console, which also at times doubled as a lectern or a dining table, and draped it with a sheet, while Capa was washing-- or sani-toweling himself-- in the bay off the head. When he emerged, looking scruffy but scrubbed, Trey said: "There's a question of mission priorities we need you to address, Capa."

He frowned slightly, looking over; he saw them grouped before the console, then, and smiled slightly, too. He came over. "What question is that, Trey?"

Pilot nodded toward the shrouded board; as Capa lifted the sheet, she asked: "Who would you like to beat first?"

His eyes sparked. He paused, glowing despite himself. Then he smiled openly and said: "All of you."

He mowed down Mace, chewed through Trey, faced both of them like Douglas Fairbanks as Zorro, grinning roguishly as he fought the forces of oppression with a sword in each hand. In sharp and metaphorical contrast, Capa was absolutely still as he played-- but it was the most animated he'd been in months.

It was Pilot who beat him. He looked across the board at her, benevolently puzzled and surprised beneath his bushy brows. Aboard ship, they'd never played, not once. He hadn't even known chess to be one of her skills; he noted as much now, admiringly.

"Over-achiever boyfriend," she said, smiling apologetically. "We used to play."

"Sounds like a dynamite relationship," Mace commented, drily.

She looked at him, her eyes casting sparkles like moonlight on dusky water. "Made for a nice breather. You know, between bouts of incredible sex."

Mace flinched around a grin. "Ouch--"

* * *

Other things for the birthday boy, the first two ordinary but generous, the third extra-ordinary (and thus, of course, anything but): four extra ounces of water, four extra ounces of ee. Capa smiled and shared it with them: "Why should I suffer alone?"

The third thing, the one of bonus-ordinariness: a square of chocolate.

Pilot set it before him, wrapped in tinfoil. As to its identity, Mace and Trey were as ignorant as Capa; when he opened it, Mace turned to Pilot and blurted: "Where in the hell did you get chocolate?"

"Emergency medical supplies."

Puzzled Trey, from beneath his generous black facial hair (which, they'd assured him, rendered him dashingly Genghis-Khanian in appearance): "How does chocolate qualify as an 'emergency medical supply'?"

"Someday, when you're a woman," Pilot replied, sagely, "you'll understand."

Capa sat between them, quietly. He remembered not liking chocolate. But he would by no means insult the gift or the givers; while the debate regarding unorthodox medical necessities lobbed between the other three, he picked up the square and nipped a corner.

"Oh, God--"

It was like a tiny chunk of heaven. He closed his eyes and let it melt on his tongue, then he touched to his tongue the index finger of the hand with which he'd lifted the square. Heaven. Months without sugar, without cocoa, without caffeine. He opened his eyes, looked around at them, and tried to break the square into pieces-- but Mace chuckled and put a hand on his arm. "Don't, man. It's okay."

After Capa ate it, though, slowly, savoringly, while they talked around and through him-- really, he thought, it was not unlike being the only drunk in a room, and a damned happy drunk at that-- Pilot smiled mischievously, leaned over, and kissed him deeply on the mouth.

"Happy birthday, Robert." She licked her lips. "Mmmm."

"That's cheating," Trey said indignantly. "That is absolutely cheating."

"So get some of your own," Pilot teased.

Trey blushed through his beard. "I'll wait, thanks."

"Well, hell, my birthday's not for seven months." Mace grinned, took Capa by the beard, and parked a kiss on his lips. "Happy birthday, man."

Capa considered. Then he said: "You didn't get any of it." He placed a hand at the back of Mace's head, pulled him in, and gave him a kiss more conducive to the exchange of sweets. Then he smiled at Mace devilishly. "There."

"Holy-- shit," Mace breathed. His forehead tipped forward, came to rest against Capa's.

"Umm, you two want a minute alone?" Trey asked.

"I'll take first watch," Pilot volunteered.

Mace pulled away, then, grinning, a little flustered. "Aw, come on--"

He stopped. He was still looking at Capa. Capa's eyes were open, but he wasn't looking back.

"Robert?" Pilot touched his arm gently. Capa didn't respond.

He was gone again.

"Hell," Mace said.

"I think he should have the thermafoam tonight," Pilot said softly.

* * *

Capa woke. The pod's lighting said it was morning. Mace was nearby, kneeling by the tool closet. For a moment, Capa was disoriented, moreso than he usually was after one of his departures. Then he realized: the softness. He was lying in the medical bay, on the thermafoam cot.

He called quietly: "Mace."

Mace turned, offered Capa a scarred and bearded smile. "Hey, man."

Capa sat up, shivering as he left the warmth of the foam, as his blanket slid from his torso. He felt no dizziness, though. "How long was I out?"

"About seven hours. Think you were gone for one, asleep for six." Mace came a little closer, watching Capa critically with his one good eye. "It's wearing you down, isn't it?"

Capa felt a twinge of shock, something akin to embarrassment, at being found out. Pilot had made no similar observations; Trey for much of their trip homeward had been off in his own dimension of meds and pain. He nodded, pushing up off the cot. "Yeah. It's like being time-synchronized, if that makes-- It's like I stop and relive a stretch of time over. Only not here. Somewhere--"

"Another dimension?"

"There's about a dozen to choose from, after all--" Mace's expression stopped short of comprehension; Capa added: "Sounds ridiculous, doesn't it?"

"You remember any of it this time?"

"No."

"You're lying," Mace said.

Capa looked at him sharply. But Mace kept his eyes level, his face neutral.

"I can see you now, remember?"

"Sorry."

"It's okay." Mace turned back to his tools. "You don't want to talk about it, that's okay, too."


	4. Chapter 4

In their eighth month, sparked by Pilot's confessed butchery of _The Odyssey_, they started an epic poem. A group poem, at any rate, "epic" being perhaps too ambitious a term. Life on Earth was their starting point; Pilot kicked it off, posting the first entry with the pod's open log, and they all took shots at it afterward. They also all gave and received scathing critiques, some of which Mace and Pilot exchanged while working on the suits and on the pod's radio systems. A match made in heaven, Capa thought, whether those bickering over the malfunctioning Marconi realized it or not: Pilot might know not only her iambics but her pentameters as well, but Mace knew what he liked. More importantly-- or frustratingly, depending on whose point of view you favored-- he knew what "worked."

Capa listened to them as he settled in at the general workstation to the right of Navs, where Trey, these months later (and having half-snapped "You try programming with one hand. Takes twice as long, doesn't it?"), was trying to get the pod's steering diagnostics up and running. Really, it was like tuning in to public radio: _This week on _Litiots, _Mace explains why rhyming lines are for sissies. Pilot explains why Mace wouldn't know a couplet if one walked up and kicked him in the ass. Brawl to follow._ Capa smiled to himself as he started the day's search. He'd been combing their databases for uncorrupted files, anything useful or revelatory that might have finished downloading to the pod's drives before the _Icarus_ died. So far he'd hit mostly raw sensor data, navigation charts, operations manuals; most of the files were too truncated to read.

Today he found something exquisite.

Three dozen files, sound format, varying lengths. His hands shook as he cued the first one to play through the pod's loudspeakers. Mace and Trey and Pilot froze as the first notes sounded in the pod's sterile dry air: a sweet seesawing of high tones from a pipe organ.

"That's Bach," Trey said wonderingly.

"The Little Fugue in g minor," Pilot added. A smile dawned on her pale face.

They had Bach, Vivaldi, Mozart, and Beethoven. Trey and Capa, the mathematicians of the tribe, were most delighted with the Bach; Pilot was relieved to find "The Seasons" was not among the Vivaldi files; and Mace--

Mace wanted to know why "classics" couldn't include the Stones.

* * *

They rationed the music as they rationed the food and water; in the tenth month, for Trey's birthday, his pick, they played the Toccata and Fugue in G Major, the grand one, the whole thing, loudly. He shared out his extra food, as Capa had. But he paused over his four bonus ounces of water.

"Pilot?" He spoke almost shyly, looking at the liquid in the steel cup.

"Yes, Trey?"

"I don't want to-- I don't mean to repulse you--" He glanced at Mace and Capa. "And I'm sorry not to share, but--"

"What is it, Trey?" Pilot prompted gently.

"Would you-- would you wash my back?" He nodded toward the water in the cup. "With this?"

* * *

Odd that Mace's trouble sleeping should increase with the return of sight to his right eye-- he should, after all, have been able to distinguish more clearly between his waking state and his unwaking one-- but increase it did. Occasional lapses in reality, things he saw peripherally, sounds. He saw a growing darkness in Capa's clear eyes and wondered if he were experiencing the same thing. But he said nothing. Not to Capa, not to Trey or Pilot. She was becoming quieter: sometimes he caught her muttering, silently, as though she were writing in her head log entries she preferred to keep in memory, away from the rest of them. Thirteen months they'd been in space.

The first real sleep he'd managed in weeks came on the eighth night of that thirteenth month. Unconsciousness folded over him like a drifting of sand or soil; it was like being buried alive, but he didn't care. No dreams, only a blackness as deep and tangible as that beyond the bulkheads--

He woke.

Something woke him. He wasn't certain what it was until--

A sound from the tube. He tipped his head toward the door of their improvised airlock. From beyond: a thumping, like a toolbelt swinging against the hatch.

Mace got up, looked about. Shadowy lowlight, glowings in green and red from the monitors. To his left, Capa had rolled onto his side, thereby forestalling his snoring. Trey, his head tipped back, had abandoned his chanted numbers and was sleeping quietly in the co-pilot's seat. (Mace frowned for a moment at that: Trey was supposed to be on watch. Then again, what was he supposed to be watching _for_? The pod would beep them awake if anything were wrong.) Pilot was curled on her side, eyes closed, facing Mace from the med bay. It was her night on the thermafoam. He crept closer to her: her eyes were rippling the undersides of her lids, but her face was peaceful. No nightmares tonight.

From the tube, the thumping again. Mace started. Not like a knocking, exactly, not intentional-sounding. (_And just who,_ he thought with a slight shiver, _would be doing the intending?_) More like one of the suits had come loose in its clamp. Why it should be bumping against the hatch or the bulkhead, though, he didn't know. It wasn't as though they were changing course; their motion was otherwise nearly undetectable, and it took considerable effort to move a suit, intentionally or not--

He caught himself. His thoughts were racing. His pulse, too. Something shuddery at the back of his mind prompted him to find a weapon. He crossed to the tool cabinet, chose a fold-out utility knife. Then he went to the inner door of the tube. Green light on the lock panel: normal pressurization beyond. He threw the handle, pulled the hatch open.

Froze.

A woman was standing at the outer hatch, her back to him. Slender, dressed in blue mission clothing. Hair hanging straight in a black ponytail between her shoulder blades.

"Corazon?" Mace asked softly.

Corazon's right hand was resting on the handle of the outer door; when he spoke, she let her arm fall straight to her side. She turned to him, smiling her quiet smile--

"Hello, Mace. How are you?"

He stared. For a long moment, it was as though his throat were filled with vacuum. No air, no sound. He swallowed, hard. "What are you doing here, Corrie?"

"I'm here to let you out."

Her hand returned to the handle of the outer door; Mace took a panicked step forward. "Wait--"

Her dark eyes met his. "What is it, Mace?"

"You can't-- I mean--" He was aware, suddenly, of the inner hatch open behind him; he was aware, suddenly, too, that the tube was very quiet. He couldn't hear a sound from the pod's main cabin. "Corrie-- you're dead."

"Am I?" Corazon left the door, came closer. Mace stood very still-- "How do you know that, Mace?"

"Pilot saw you die. She saw--"

She touched his arm. Her fingers were slender and warm. He shuddered, hard; Corazon's smile went politely apologetic, and she took her hand away. "There's something you need to know, Mace."

He was trying-- really, he was trying-- to draw away. _No sound from the cabin_. "What's that?"

"This is a survival sim, Stephen. You've passed. I'm here to let you out."

It was as though he'd been locking his knees: dizziness shook through his chest, rattled into his skull. "We've been in here for months--"

"It only seems that way. It was the same for me and Kaneda and Harvey and Searle. It's in the food, Stephen: it was part of the test. You've been drugged all along."

"What about my eyes? Trey's arm? We had to cut off his--"

"Who said Trey had to lose his arm?"

He swallowed. His molars knocked together, top and bottom. "Pilot."

"Who's Pilot, Mace? Do you even know her real name?"

"No--"

"Before the evacuation, what's the last thing you remember about her?"

"I saw-- She was--" He saw it, before the flash that blinded him, before they-- she-- sealed the pod's outer hatch: Pilot, half-carrying, half-dragging Capa, her shirt and arms wet and reddish-dark with-- "She had blood all over her."

"Whose blood, Mace? Hers?"

"No."

"Whose, then?"

"I don't know--"

"Shh. Mace: shh--" Corazon touched him again, a light hand on each of his forearms. "We'll leave that for the mission psychologists." She smiled at him, gently. "This has gone far enough, don't you think? Come on. Let's go home."

_Home_.

She took his hand, led him to the outer hatch. He whispered "But we _are_ going home--"; he couldn't make himself heard--

Corazon put her free hand on the hatch release. Mace put his free hand over hers. "Wait--"

"Christ, Mace, what are you doing--?"

Mace swung around. Capa was standing in the inner hatchway, staring at him.

"I'm not-- Look: it's--"

He turned back to Corazon. Only she was no longer there. His hand, not hers, was on the handle of the hatch release.

"Mace?"

Pilot, now. Mace released the handle, turned around. She was next to Capa in the hatchway, a concerned frown on her face. Then her eyes drifted to the side, to his right, and the frown deepened. "What are you doing, Mace?"

"I'm not-- It's not what you--" He realized, then: she was looking at the utility knife. He was still holding it open. "Corazon was here. She said-- she said this is a test."

"Corazon's not here, Mace," Capa said evenly.

"She was just--" Mace pushed tangled hair away from his good eye. "She said we've been drugged. It's a test--"

"Corazon is dead, Mace." Pilot stepped slowly into the tube. "I saw her."

"You _said_ you saw her. She was right here. She _touched_ me--" He looked past her, desperately, to Capa. "She said we've been drugged, man. Capa-- it's all a test. Don't you see? None of it's real. We just have to open the--"

Like that, Pilot had him. She jerked his knife hand forward, swung her free elbow into his jaw. Then she caught him under the arm, over the shoulder, and put him on his back. Like that. The knife clattered on the decking; the air was punched from Mace's lungs. A second later, Pilot was kneeling over him, her booted left foot on his throat. The utility knife was in her hand.

"Do you know what's real, Mace? Do you?"

He looked up at her, stunned, frankly terrified. A muscle twitched in her jaw-- and then she held out her free hand and drew the blade of the knife across her palm.

"No--" Mace choked.

The slit for a moment was clean. Then it widelined with blood. Pilot reached for his face, rubbed the cut roughly across his cheek. "_That's_ real, Mace. I'm real. You're real. Capa and Trey are real. The pod is real. Everything else is bullshit. Do you understand?"

"Y--yes."

She looked at him; she looked away, her eyes filling with tears. She moved away from him and stood. "Capa." She wiped the blade on her trousers, folded the knife, and held it out to him. Capa took it. She brushed past him and past Trey, roused finally from his non-watch to contribute a horrified stare to the proceedings, and went back into the cabin.

* * *

She was sitting on the deck by the cabinet that contained their medical supplies. Capa was kneeling beside her, daubing disinfectant on her palm.

Mace said, "I'll do it."

Capa stood, stepped aside. Pilot didn't say anything, didn't even flinch as Mace cleaned and dressed her hand. Then he sat down next to her and drew her close. She shifted, put her arms around him, held him tightly.

_This is what's real,_ he thought.

* * *

No more than two of them slept at any given time. Those awake, in addition to seeing to the needs of the pod and its systems, watched the sleepers for signs of nightmares. "We respect our dreams," Trey said. "We don't give in to them."

They taught each other litanies of sleep. Trey chanted progressions of numbers back and forth with Mace. Pilot taught Capa the rosary-- and smiled wearily at the twitchings of distaste she saw beneath his beard.

"It's alright, Robert. I'm not trying to convert you. It's meditation: that's all."

* * *

A working week, five days, later, Trey completed the reprogramming of the guidance system diagnostics. Four hours after that, the diagnostics completed their first comprehensive scan in over a year.

Mace sat on his heels and haunches next to Pilot, who was asleep on the deck near the tool closet. He was looking down at her; he was hesitating. She was deeply asleep, her face untroubled. She might be dead; she might be lying thirty million miles away, warm and safe in a real bed, sleeping a careless heavy sleep on a rainy Sunday morning.

"We have to tell her, Mace," Trey said.

He swallowed. Even yesterday, the idea that both Trey and Capa were afraid to wake her-- she had a tendency to take a blind swing at whoever shook her from a sleep like this (whether intentionally or unconsciously the pod's three male inhabitants couldn't decide)-- might have made him smile. Now he reached soberly down, gently ran fingertips along her cheek.

"Pilot."

"Mmm." She reached for the caressing hand, her eyes still closed. A shiver, not unpleasant, tingled through Mace's chest as she touched his wrist, his fingers.

"You need to wake up, Pilot."

She opened her eyes and looked up at him, and for a moment _he_ was those thirty million miles away, they both were, facing each other from their pillows on a gray soft lazy morning.

Then it ended. She was awake. "What is it, Mace?"

Trey came forward as she sat up. "We're off-course."


	5. Chapter 5

The problem lay not with Trey's calculations or with Capa's. It was the pod. The deviation had been very gradual, and hence was not disastrous; the problem was, they couldn't adjust.

"The computer thinks it's right," Trey said. He was seated at Navs; the other three were crowded in around him, looking to the monitor before him: two green blips, one showing where they were, one, a slender pie-slice of distance away from the first, showing where they should be. "Which means one of two things: the booster array is out of alignment or the data bus between the boosters and the mainframe has been corrupted."

Mace spoke: "So the ship has forgotten how to speak 'booster,' or the boosters have forgotten how to speak 'ship.'"

"That's about it."

"Either way, we have to correct the drift," Capa said. "And diagnostics would take too long."

"So," Pilot said, "you need to create a new interface based on accurate data."

"How?" Trey asked.

Pilot looked at Mace. He thought for a moment, then said: "We go out, check the alignment on the boosters, re-set it to spec, record the settings, and load them to the mainframe. Just one problem--"

"As long as it's just the one," Pilot said, drily.

"-- those systems aren't meant to be accessed by the casual user."

"So we void the warranty," Trey said. "I think we can live with that."

"No, no, no." Mace shook his shaggy head. "These escape configurations are meant for that and that only. Escape. Not for modification or upgrade. Only the most rudimentary adjustments or repairs." He caught Pilot's eye. "Like your trick with the blocked oh-two tank. Here--" They followed him to the co-pilot's seat, watched as he called up the pod's exterior schematics. Mace pointed to an area beneath the booster array. "Shielding-- there-- over the access to the drive system. It's completely armored."

"Can we cut our way through?" Pilot asked.

"Those panels are extremely heat-resistant. No way our torches are up to the task."

"So what do we do?"

"We get under the shielding-- here." Mace pointed to the trailing edge of the panels, nearest the pod's engines. "We worm our way inside--"

"'Worming,'" Capa echoed. "In suits."

"Yep. We rig a couple of jacks and pry up a panel."

"Won't that damage the shielding?" Pilot asked.

"It shouldn't. The metal's pretty resilient. That's the thing, though: we'll be bracing it up at high tension. If it lets loose, snaps back--"

"Whoever's in the hole gets trapped, crushed, or cut in half," Trey said, flatly.

"Pretty much, yeah."

"There's another problem," Trey continued. "You said these escape configurations weren't designed with external repairs in mind, right? So who's to say the tools we're carrying can handle stressors like that? Metal ratings aren't the same for exterior and interior toolkits: you know that, Mace."

"Don't have a choice, do we? We get out there, we make it quick--"

"How quick is 'quick' in that kind of cold?" Capa asked quietly.

Mace glared and opened his mouth; Pilot cut him off: "We need jacks, gentlemen. Let's see what we can come up with."

* * *

Mace and Pilot went into the suits. Capa volunteered quietly, knowing that both Mace and Pilot would veto the offer and not resenting it: he hadn't suffered an absence for weeks, but the possibility was still there. They simply couldn't risk him going catatonic outside.

* * *

_How's it feel to be stretching your legs?_

Pilot's voice, over his suit feed. Mace smiled, a little shakily. Tethered, they were float-walking downward, moving aft, following the undercurve of the pod's hull. Each of them carried an improvised and folded tripod jack some two-and-a-half meters long, cord-anchored to their wrists. Mace carried the toolkit that would open the access panel to the drive systems.

"Feels okay," he said, looking ahead at her gold-suited back. "Little weird, but okay."

_Good_.

They reached the booster array at the pod's stern, the black cowls of the engines, the anchoring grids spiderwebbing up and around them. Upside-down, Mace looked out the space beyond and behind them. A tremendous eyeful of blackness. The sun below and to the right, glaring and distant. To the left, above and below, impossibly far off and still-- because, statistically, there was really nothing between them and him but emptiness-- near enough to touch: stars.

A moment of vertigo. Mace felt himself breathing a little harder.

_Focus_.

Pilot was facing him. He turned to her, looked critically at the chalky white shielding near the boosters.

"Jacks here and here," he said, pointing. Pilot moved a few meters back, planted the lip of her jack where he indicated. Mace planted his. "Brace yourself. And: push."

An imagined metallic groan, silent in the vacuum, as their panel separated from the one nearest it. The metal was just over an inch thick, and, putting it mildly, was stubborn. Mace and Pilot shared a grunt over their suit feeds.

_Son of a bitch_-- she muttered.

"Almost there," Mace replied.

* * *

He went into the hole. Under the panel, along the sub-hull, with the toolkit. Four meters to the access panel. His breathing was loud in his own ears.

It must have been loud in hers, too. _How are you doing, Mace?_

"Fine, sweetheart."

_Time and place, buddy_. Trey's voice. Finally.

"Thanks for joining the party, Pod," Mace said, amiably. "Thought we were missing our inside line." He was at the smooth black of the access panel; he reached in the toolkit, unclipped a power-driver, started unscrewing the bolts. "How are the jacks, Pilot?"

Drolly: _Holding, sweetie-pie_.

_Oh, stop it,_ said Trey.

Mace lifted the panel away. "We're open." He edged inside: the panel was wide, a meter or more: he pushed inside, careful of the toolkit and his tether. "At the booster interface now."

_Mace_. Pilot's voice. _Minor bowing on your jack_.

"Acknowledged." Mace studied the interface, the readings that indicated the alignment on the array. He pulled a wrench from the toolkit. "Trey, tell Capa it's the last time I let him drive. Jesus Christ, this thing is messed up."

_You're joking, right?_ Trey, sounding just short of mortified.

"Nothing that can't be fixed. On it now." Mace started the adjustments; he said: "How's that jack holding, Pilot?"

_Not healthy. Say two minutes on the outside_.

"Understood."

His heart was pounding. At least Pilot and Trey and Capa couldn't hear _that_. Mace slowed his breathing as his hands moved more quickly. He could feel cold creeping microscopically through the armor-tight weave of his gloves. But it went smoothly: the array was out of line, but not catastrophically so, and he fixed it and was just reaching for the data cable to patch the new fresh accurate readings to the microdrive that they'd link to the pod's mainframe inside when--

-- over his feed, a terrible isolated sound--

A harsh grunt of pain, followed by a wheezing, a gasping.

Pilot.

Mace's heart jerked in his chest. "Pilot--?"

_Mace-- oh, fuck--_

He was backing out of the access hatch, pulling his way back along the sub-hull. Trey wasn't saying anything: nothing he could say would be of use: they had the comms on the suits working, but the systems monitoring had proven unfixable, which meant those in the pod couldn't read the lifesigns of those outside.

"Pilot, say something--"

Gasping on the feed. _Suit breach_.

"Hold on." _Jesus-fucking-shit_-- "Stay calm."

A wrong time for blasphemy, maybe. Mace's suit caught against the edge of the shielding panel that they'd pried up. The gap was now much lower on one side. He grunted, pulling himself to the wider part of the space, barely cleared it. Looked desperately around.

One of the legs of his jack had shattered. The jack had buckled in on itself as the panel shoved it down. The second jack was holding. And Pilot wasn't there.

She was floating clear of the pod.

"Jesus, no--!"

Then Mace caught himself. He saw: she was tethered. She was still tethered. He braced himself. A second, a beat, while his one good eye gauged angles and distances. Then he did the stupidest goddamn thing he'd ever done, that he'd possibly ever do: he launched himself at her.

Velocity, a weightless tumbling. It was as though he were the one hanging in space, as though she were the one rushing at him like a meteor. They struck silently; Mace grunted, grabbed, caught her by the arm. An elastic tightening as their tethers straightened, strained-- and held.

"Pilot?"

He turned her so that they were facing. He could barely see her through the slits in their helmets, but he could hear her panting. Her left hand was clamped tight to the right side of her chest.

Then he saw: blood was floating in tiny blobs and crystals inside her helmet.

"Pilot--!"

Her eyes, through the slit, open, glazing. _Fuck, Mace-- Fuck, it-- Fuck: it hurts_--

He reached to the toolkit at his belt, took out two packets like squares of medical gauze. "Need you to move your hand, Pilot."

She didn't respond.

Then Trey, over the feed: _Mace, what's going on?_

"Jack shattered. Pilot has a suit breach." He pulled at Pilot's arm, sweating in his suit, chilled, terrified, panicked. Calm. "Pilot, move your fucking hand--!"

_Shit,_ Pilot gasped.

She shifted her hand. There was a jagged gash in her suit, maybe three inches across. God _damn_: she'd caught a chunk of the jack leg when it shattered. Over the hole, Mace slapped down first one of the packets from his toolkit, then the other. Handipatch. Two-stage. One square reading CATALYST: APPLY THIS SIDE, the other saying THIS SIDE DOWN. Mace held his glove over the hole, over the packets, while they melted together, solidified.

Sealed.

He hung there with her, staring into her helmet slit. Her eyes were closed.

_Mace, report_. Capa. Mace ignored him.

Upside-down in space. "Pilot?" Mace said, evenly. "Pilot, look at me."

And she did. She opened her deepwater eyes. They were calm with shock.

"How's your air?" he asked.

_Okay_.

"We need to get you inside."

_No._

_No_. An echo from Capa, over the feed. He said out loud what Mace was thinking: _We don't have the resources to build another jack; we only have one shot at this, Mace._

"Fuck you."

_Wasting time,_ Pilot said hoarsely, her eyes filled with pain. She was focusing, hard, on Mace. _Let's do it._

* * *

The other jack was holding. This time, Pilot went into the hole, taking with her the data cable, the microdrive in its insulated case. Alone on the pod's hull, Mace did the second stupidest thing he'd ever do.

He unhooked his tether.

The legs of the second jack were holding. The handle-lock wasn't. Even one-eyed, Mace could see the cracks wrinkling the metal, the tiny chips breaking away, floating. He passed his suit tether through the tether loop on the jack handle, circled the line several times around the jack, and pulled it tight. Then he knelt beside the base of the jack, as close as he could get, and wrapped his right arm around the handle, pressing his side hard against it. He re-hooked the tether to his suit.

_Still with us, Pilot?_ Capa's voice, warmer now.

_Yes, Robert_.

Another chunk broke from the jack lock. Against his side, all the way through the suit, Mace felt the handle slip. "Just about finished, baby?"

_Yes_. She was keeping her voice even. He could hear the pain in her breathing. _Don't get fresh_.

Mace smiled. "Yes, ma'am."

Then the lock shattered.

The handle, released, punched into Mace's side. Pain: sudden, hard, blunt. He groaned. But his suit didn't tear; his air held. And the panel didn't slam down.

Yet.

"The lock's gone, Pilot." The pressure from the handle jerked the suit tether taut, pulled Mace more tightly against the jack. Any second now something would give, most likely the loop anchoring the tether to Mace's suit. Then he'd have a breach of his own to deal with. "Hurry it up."

_Coming out now, Mace_.

Pilot appeared in the gap; she bumped through, floated clear. She pulled her way to him. He reached around her, took a cable cutter from the toolkit she now carried.

"Did you get it?" he asked.

_Got it._

"Hold on to me," he said.

She locked both her arms around the left arm of his suit. Mace cut his tether. The line spun free; the jack released; the panel of heat shielding slammed silently shut.

Mace took from the toolkit a bungee line, a carabiner at each end. He hooked one to his belt, one to Pilot's.

"Let's get inside," he said.

* * *

Between Pilot's right breast and right shoulder, a hole. At the bottom of said hole, a chunk of metal roughly one inch square.

Trey and Capa unsuited her. She was still conscious, barely but stubbornly so; they helped her stumble to the medical bay. Then, as Trey helped Mace with his suit-locks, Capa settled her back onto the thermafoam cot and cut away her t-shirt.

Unsuited, Mace stood watching, shaking. Cold and shock: they hit him in tandem. Trey carefully set the microdrive at the navs station; he got a blanket and gently draped it around Mace's shoulders.

"Good job, Mace," he said. Mace nodded. He shuddered and pulled the blanket tightly around himself and watched uselessly as Trey went to help Capa with Pilot.

* * *

_Ugly_, thought Capa, looking at the hole.

Pilot wasn't bleeding heavily, but the chunk of metal, as far as he could tell, was deep in her pectoral; worse, it had frozen the immediately surrounding tissue on its way in. Subcutaneous frostbite: some kind of first, surely. And, untreated, sure to lead to necrosis and infection.

When Trey joined him, Capa said: "I'm not sure what we should do--"

With her left hand, Pilot caught his arm. She met his eyes calmly. "Get it out of me, Robert."

* * *

Not long into the procedure, she passed out. Capa didn't think less of her for it. His hands remained steady as he dug with forceps for Pilot's private meteorite; he felt Mace watching him balefully, desperately. None of them spoke. When with a soft wet popping sound the chunk of metal left its fleshy resting place, the three men breathed out in unison. An inch square, at least, dark and bloody and glinting as Capa held it up to the light.

"Wow," Trey said.

Capa dropped it onto the instrument tray, looked back at the wound. Then he took a scalpel from the tray and, as best as he was able, as carefully and gently as he could, cut the frostbitten tissue from the hole in Pilot's chest.

* * *

She woke. Her chest and shoulder hurt; she could feel the wound. Jagged and burning and tight, as if it were packed with something. But she wasn't feeling as much pain as she might have been. Drugs. The boys had found the rest of the meds.

Or--

_Or_--

Capa was sitting next to her. His bearded chin was resting on his chest; his wideset eyes were closed. Asleep. He looked like an illustration in a book of saints and martyrs. Pilot smiled slightly. _He wouldn't like that, now, would he--?_

"Robert," she said, quietly.

He opened his Earth-sky eyes, and for a moment it was as though he'd forgotten where he was. He shook himself, looked down at her, smiled. "Hello, there."

"Am I dead?" Pilot asked.

Capa touched her cheek gently. "No."


	6. Chapter 6

From the microdrive to the mainframe went the data Pilot and Mace had captured from the re-aligned booster array. The conjuring then fell on Trey, who, with Capa's help, over the following day (Pilot had spent just the one night, nine hours, absolutely unconscious), taught the mainframe to communicate accurately, precisely, and respectfully with the pod's drive systems.

"At least the damned thing doesn't talk any more," Capa said, as he typed the lines of code Trey was feeding him.

Trey stopped rambling in computerese long enough to say, "I thought I was the only one who hated that interface."

Mace, seated on the floor near the thermafoam cot and Pilot, let out a snort. "Man, _everyone_ hated that interface."

"Why have it, then?" Capa asked.

"Probably so we'd have something other than each other to bitch about." Pilot sat up, stiffly. She reached down, rested her good hand on Mace's shoulder. He caught it, held it, turned his head, smiled up at her. She asked Trey: "How long before we know if it works?"

"Programming nearly completed. Rebooting time for affected systems: roughly an hour. Tricky going."

"Alright." Pilot stood. Mace got off the floor. He took her arm, gently, to stabilize her; she gently broke away. She went to the pilot's station, knelt carefully, reached up into the housing, and removed a thick long black cylinder. She uncapped one end and removed a bottle of champagne.

"Still there," she said quietly. "I was saving it for the end of the mission, but, all things considered--"

Trey and Capa finished at Navs; they joined Mace and Pilot at the center console. Mace lined up four cups on the console's dusty black top.

Capa looked at the bottle. "Do we drink it now-- or an hour from now?"

Trey spoke: "I want to drink it now. While I'm feeling hope."

* * *

Mace raised the first cup. "To the mission."

Capa: "To those we left behind."

Trey: "To us."

Silence from Pilot. She was thinking of someone. Not of them. Mace could see it. A long moment passed. She frowned slightly, seeing whoever it was she was remembering. Then she raised her cup and looked at Trey, at Capa, at Mace.

She smiled and said: "To you."

* * *

It worked. The reprogramming. The mainframe's lesson in manners.

If it hadn't, the radio might not have been speaking Russian eight days later.

Trey, again starting awake on watch, stared, bewildered, at the jabbering comms station. At first he thought the re-booting of the navigational systems had somehow revived the hated spoken interface-- and that, just to boost its standing on the annoyance scale, the interface had thrown over English in favor of verbal obfuscation. But then Mace was there, up from the pilot's seat, staring at the radio with Trey, both of them, stupidly, as though they could somehow better understand the sounds by seeing them; and then they were shouting aft, toward the sleeping area: "Capa! Pilot! Get up here!"

* * *

The Small Object Survey Vessel _Natascha_. Russo-Indian registry. Mace had managed to focus one of the pod's exterior cameras on her. A tough, ugly strip-and-salvage ship, built to wrangle meteors and debris, to bump heads with asteroids, not unlike the 'berg handlers of oil fields in the North Atlantic. A gray, battered, heavy hull accreted with storage units, a bristling of cranes and grappling arms.

"Beautiful," Trey murmured, looking at her on one of the pod's monitors. He and Mace and Pilot were standing behind Capa, seated at the comms station; while both he and Pilot spoke Russian, Capa was more confident at it. A woman's voice spoke from the radio; he translated:

"Ess-oh-ess _Natascha_, registry number et cetera, et cetera-- Captain respectfully hopes that unidentified vessel to ascendant sector on their starboard side is not in need of assistance, as they have only just started their current mission. They are two weeks from Earth."

Mace was shaking. Beside him, Pilot was shaking, too. She caught his hand, held it tightly.

She said, evenly: "Please inform the _Natascha_, Doctor Capa, that we are the iIcarus/i inbound from the sun. Inform their captain also that we are sorry to disappoint her, but we gratefully request any assistance they might provide."


	7. Chapter 7

And: home.

Home.

Not exactly, not instantly, but nearly enough. Two weeks later, the S.O.S. _Natascha_ deposited into the capable grappling hooks of the vicinity-tending vessels of International Space Station _Kubrick_ the last remaining parts of the _Icarus II,_ those parts consisting of the command sector, the command sector's emergency-deployment engine assembly, and a makeshift airlock.

From which emerged, those two weeks later, into the fresh sterile cool air of ISS _Kubrick_, four shabby, shaggy, dirty people. Three men, one woman.

Curtis Bowman, commander of the _Kubrick,_ ginger-haired, lean and tidy in his pale gray ISS uniform, waited outside the inner door of _Kubrick_'s second airlock. A medical team waited with him. The VTs had confirmed the docking was solid; the _Icarus_ was secure in her mooring.

The door gasped, unsealing. And there they were. Bowman looked at them with the respect they deserved, seeing them not as the motley tribe they'd obviously become after more than a year in a lifepod but as the clean, clear faces in the files forwarded him by one Dr. Daniel Monroe, the Icarus Project's primary contact on Earth. He focused on the woman, saluted, and asked, politely:

"Lieutenant Whitby?"

* * *

_My name is Pilot._

He and those with him: they were so clean. And it was so bright--

Pilot slowly returned the salute. Mace, beside her, and Capa and Trey, behind them, were as silent as she was. The ginger-haired man in front of her-- _Was he even real?--_ prompted, clearly, patiently: "Lieutenant Loinnir Whitby?"

_My name is_--

Pilot heard herself say: "I am Lieutenant Whitby, yes. Lieutenant Stephen Mace, Icarus Mission Specialist Edward Trey, Dr. Robert Capa, and I request permission to come aboard, sir."

"Permission granted, Lieutenant." The man smiled broadly, extending his hand. Pilot took it numbly. The contact was almost shocking. "Commander Curtis Bowman, Space Station _Kubrick_. Welcome aboard. Lieutenant, gentlemen: welcome home."

* * *

When they could stand it-- after they'd been cleaned and re-clothed, in standard-issue loose trousers and gray sweatshirts and soft boots, after they'd had their first medical checks, after they'd eaten their first real food (not much, really, and not much unlike the ees: their stomachs wouldn't tolerate change, not yet, the medics said), before they rested-- when they could bear to venture into that much open space (and they could only bear it as a group, as a unit)-- they entered the _Kubrick_'s observation lounge and walked, as a group, slowly, to the windows.

And looked down at the Earth.

"It's so blue," Capa whispered.

Trey stepped closer, put his palm to the reinforced glass. Tears were running down his cheeks.


	8. Chapter 8

Descent.

They came to Earth aboard the space shuttle _Artemis_, bound for Edwards Air Force Base in California. The long winter might have ended; now the desert spring was lingering. The ground toward which they made their controlled falling was carpeted, spattered, splashed with color: wildflowers ruled the desert beyond the base in rangy splays of pink and purple, orange and yellow and white.

Their first steps onto the planet were to be private. Press, photographers, even family: all would come later, after they were rested and fed and made to look like the heroes that Dr. Monroe, in a message transmitted to the _Kubrick_, had told them they were. They passed through stages of emotion, a continuum of sorts, as the shuttle approached the base, which ran roughly from a feeling of harsh giddiness at the thought _I never have to see these people again_ to a feeling of cold hard sadness with glints of panic at the same.

Tarmac, braking. A blue van driving their way. A truck team bringing the rollaway stairs. Under an open blue sky, under the earthly desert sun, out the shuttle's hatch and down the metal steps they went, all four of them holding tightly to the railing-- wind was buffeting from the west, not a gale but seeming one against their bottled-air skins--

-- and Capa, the first one down, stood still, his boots on the dusty macadam, shaking, breathing the dry clear air. _Now is when it ends,_ he thought. _Now is when I'm jerked back_-- He closed his eyes against the light and color, the heat, the air in windy motion, waiting--

Next to him, Mace said, "My God, what a beautiful day."

* * *

From their giddy thoughts of splitting up, to the sense that the space now surrounding them vastly exceeded their needs, came a gravitating that found them all in Pilot's room on the afternoon of the day following their return. They were quartered in a hub of rooms surrounding a central station-- not unlike a critical ward in a hospital-- the thought being, from Monroe and the other doctors of the project, that not only did they require monitoring during their re-adjustment period but that they'd each feel more comfortable knowing the others were near. As much as Capa-- and, to a slightly lesser extent, Mace-- hated to admit it, Dr. Monroe was right.

Capa had slept poorly the night before. After a dinner of bland vegetable stew and salad (both served in portions proportioned to suit their shrunken stomachs), which had been subsequent to a quick but thorough poking, prodding, and blood-drawing at the hands of a Project Icarus medic, he'd found himself lying unsettled on a mattress that seemed bog-soft and suffocating after a year and a handful of months of sleeping on the deck of the pod. He ended up sleeping on the floor of his room. He suspected that Pilot-- Whitby, he reminded himself-- and Trey and Mace had spent their first night back beside rather than on their beds, too.

Now he was still on a floor-- only now it was Whitby's, and he was sitting with his back against her nightstand-- waiting with the other survivors of the _Icarus_ mission for their first debriefing. He was wearing a formal mission uniform-- dress shirt, blue jacket, blue trousers, all seeming cavernous and stiff-- as was Trey, who was seated across the way on the chair from the room's computer desk. Mace and Whitby, wearing Air Force uniforms, were sitting side-by-side on her bed, their backs to the headboard. All of them were clean and trimmed and shaved-- Capa's first self-indulgent moment of happiness in nearly three years had come when the last of that damned beard hit the floor of the base barbershop in a rusty swirl of whisps and whiskers.

Across from him, as though catching Capa's thought, Trey rubbed the bare skin of his jaw. "You know what's odd?" he asked.

"What?" Whitby prompted.

"I can't smell you anymore." Trey frowned at the air between them and him. "Any of you. I grew accustomed to it. It's funny, but I almost miss it."

"I can smell Capa," Mace said casually.

"You can not," Capa shot back.

Mace grinned down at him from the bed. He leaned over the edge and snuffled Capa's neck. "What the hell is that, Capa? Patchouli?" He sniffed harder. "No, wait: you've been _toking_ on us, man--!"

"Get off of me--" Capa shoved him away unsavagely. "It's aftershave, you ape."

"Never going to pass your drug screen now," Whitby said solemnly. She caught Mace's uniform jacket, hauled him upright on the comforter. "Like they'll ever let you fly another mission to the sun. _Pfft_. Robert Capa: washout."

"Pot aftershave, huh?" Trey mused. "Wow. Could you score me some of that?"

Above Capa, Mace chuckled. Capa smiled. Nerves. It beat sitting in silence. Truthfully, tension rippled between them every time someone passed the room's open door. What was real in the pod had included them and them only: the personnel on the _Kubrick_ and now the mission personnel-- even kindly Dr. Monroe, whom they'd known from the Icarus Project's training campus in Duluth-- seemed ghostlike by comparison. Mace admitted it: since their arrival yesterday, he'd bumped into half a dozen or so people, blaming it on spacelegs, his impaired depth perception, just to see if they were real.

Now one of those ghost-people stopped in the doorway. A young man, a mission adjunct in a gray suit. He looked in at them with a mix of respect, irritation, and surprise on his tanned face: obviously, three of the people in the room were not where he had expected to find them.

"Lieutenant Whitby?" he said to Pilot. "It's time. You too, gentlemen. Come with me, please."

* * *

Pilot was the last to testify.

Mace still couldn't adjust to thinking of her as "Whitby," let alone "Loinnir," the pronunciation of which left him feeling as though he were kneeling on his tongue (even her saying, uncritically, that "Lorna" would do for now didn't help). The debriefing room was darkly and well furnished and pleasantly under-lit-- a touch keyed to the comfort of those who hadn't seen strong light in over a year-- and his first statement and Trey's and Capa's had gone reasonably smoothly. Not a pretty story, all things considered, but they'd been successful at their task and had survived to tell about it. "The gratitude of the Earth and of humanity is yours...," et cetera, et cetera: Mace, being a military man and hence having less patience for words than for action, had tuned out the rest of it, the base liaison's speech before the proceedings.

What he wanted to hear was Pilot's account of the events leading to the evacuation. Trey and Capa, they wanted it, too: he could sense it in them, could see it in the quiet patient frown on Trey's face, the way in which Capa, sitting forward at their shared table, was rolling his fingers into peaks and steeples beneath his chin.

Now they were hearing her, and it was painful and frustrating, chilling and heartbreaking, by turns.

"Dr. Corazon was dead when I found her," Pilot said clearly, facing the project analyst to Dr. Monroe's right.

"How did she die?" The analyst-- a hardfaced darkhaired woman in a black business dress-- gave Pilot possibly six seconds of silence. Then she said again: "Lieutenant, how did she die?"

Mace saw Pilot frown. Just a flicker of her brows. She said, hollowly: "We had an intruder, ma'am."

Dr. Monroe asked, quietly: "Did you know the identity of the intruder, Lieutenant?"

"No, sir, I did not."

Monroe looked at her thoughtfully. "What happened then?"

"I located the intruder and-- negated the threat, sir."

"'Negated,' Lieutenant?" prompted the analyst, drily.

Pilot stiffened in her chair. "Respectfully, ma'am, I refuse to clarify."

The analyst began to speak-- Mace nearly did, too-- but Monroe merely said: "Very well, Lieutenant. Proceed."

Pilot glanced at Mace. She'd seen him start to protest-- after all their time together, the four of them, they could read each other like extensions of themselves-- and her look now said _Be patient_.

She continued: "After that, I initiated the ship's evacuation sequence. Lieutenant Mace and Mr. Trey worked, meanwhile, to stabilize our situation. Both of them were badly hurt in the process. Dr. Capa proceeded forward, to the payload launch platform. When the lifepod was prepped, I went to fetch him."

"What of Mr. Trey and Lieutenant Mace?" asked another Project Icarus analyst, a burly block of a man, far to Monroe's left.

Pilot looked at him coolly. "They were already aboard the pod. The countdown to launch was automated, barring manual override. If Dr. Capa and I had been delayed, they still would have gotten away, if that's what you're asking."

Asked Dr. Monroe: "Did Dr. Capa indicate-- when you found him-- that the stellar bomb had successfully deployed?"

"Yes, sir, he did."

Mace felt suddenly cold. _How did you find him, Pilot?_

Monroe continued: "Then why wasn't he on his way to the lifepod?"

_How did we survive?_

She might have heard him thinking. She looked his way, smiled slightly for him.

"Solacy," she said.

"Pardon me, Lieutenant?" said Monroe.

"Sun-madness, sir." Pilot turned her eyes from Mace to the good doctor. "He'd been looking at it for too long."

"Dr. Capa was blind?" asked the analyst to Monroe's right.

"No, ma'am," Pilot replied. "He was a bit-- confused. That's all."

* * *

At dinner that night, Monroe told them that Project Icarus had contacted their families. Within days, they'd have visitors.


	9. Chapter 9

Capa's sister was the first. Without her son and daughter (the project for now restricting the presence of children amongst those recently come home), without-- and, very likely, Capa found this more upsetting than the absence of his niece and nephew-- Capa's dog. But Capa was ecstatic. Mace could see it in the blue light spilling from his eyes. After a first embrace that seemed to last a geologic age, after muttered, shyly smiling introductions, their mission physicist and his sister Rosa settled themselves into a zone of placid calm. They wandered off, talking quietly, toward the rose garden behind the building where the _Icarus_ survivors were quartered; Rosa herself would be staying on the base, at the project's invitation, for as long as she liked-- or, as she put it, drolly-- as long as friends back home, a married couple with kids of their own, could stand her terrible twosome.

* * *

Then, the next day:

Trey's parents, in from Hong Kong. Among the potted palms and bromeliads of the visitors' lounge they hugged and held him; they discreetly eyed his pinned-up empty sleeve and looked stoic through their happiness.

"Had to be done," Trey said, holding his mother with his remaining arm. "It's okay."

His father's face was very still. "Who did that to you, Edward?"

Trey glanced across the lounge to Whitby, who was standing near the ceiling-high windows and who, along with Mace, was conducting what was proving to be an unsuccessful experiment in invisibility. She flinched slightly; Trey smiled apologetically at her, over his mother's shoulder, and said: "She did."

Whitby held her ground as Mr. Trey approached. He looked at her critically; she looked back at him evenly. Then he held out his hand, and Whitby took it. His handshake was warm and firm.

"Thank you for our son," he said.

* * *

Corazon's husband arrived later that day. He spoke with Whitby, quietly, the two of them alone in the lounge as bluish dusk filled the high windows. Then he left again.

* * *

The hardest one came the next day.

Jean Harvey.

She'd be there within the hour, their tanned young mission adjunct informed them, as they sat at breakfast, the four of them and Rosa, too.

Stillness settled over the table. Capa stared into his oatmeal and set his spoon on a napkin and pushed the napkin away. A muscle twitched in his hollow cheek. He said: "I don't think I can talk to her, Mace."

"I'll do it, man. It's okay."

* * *

She was just over five feet of angel and spitfire. Amber-honey hair, wide blue eyes. He'd adored her, Harvey had. She looked a little dead now, a little lost in the open space of the lounge.

"Hey, Jeannie," Mace said, smiling.

She turned to him from the windows and walked into his arms without a sound. Mace held her and looked at the flowering desert beyond the windows, focusing hard on the rough gold and serge of the mountains to the west, so that when she started to cry he didn't cry, too. She held tight to him and shook quietly against him, and Mace did what any decent man would do and let her.

"Was it quick?"

"Yeah," he said.

A slight quavering in her voice, as though her heart were shaking just there, at the base of her throat. "Because I read the report they showed us, and it said that-- that-- But I have to ask you, Mace: did he suffer?"

"No. It was over like that. He didn't suffer."

She pulled away a bit; she nodded, not looking at him. Mace was glad of that. She hadn't heard the lie, or was gracious enough to pretend she hadn't; not looking at him, she couldn't see the tears in his good right eye. She didn't say "Good.": there was nothing good about it. Her husband was dead.

She said, finally: "Thank you for talking to me."


	10. Chapter 10

They were to have two more visitors.

The first arrived on the Friday of their first week back.

* * *

Cassie.

* * *

She disembarked from the space shuttle _Daedalus_ and came straight in from the dusty airfield. She walked into the visitors' lounge carrying a black duffel bag. She looked a little older but as beautiful as Mace had remembered her; her dark hair was pulled back in the same tidy bun; and she wore the black uniform of a commercial shuttle pilot.

He stood still, watching her from a distance, well across the room. Trey, standing with him, did too. Pilot was the first to acknowledge her: they faced one another and embarked on a classic windmilled parody of greeting, Cassie at first offering her hand while Pilot saluted, then Cassie saluting while Pilot reached out. Then Pilot simply grabbed her and hugged her, and Cassie, laughing, hugged her back.

Even from his distance and Trey's, Mace heard Pilot say: "'Though she be but little, she is fierce.'"

"Welcome home, you painted maypole," Cassie replied, squeezing her replacement, her much taller self.

* * *

Then Capa walked in.

Maybe he'd been right, Mace thought: that half-nuts gobbledegook Capa had spouted at them during their "university" days in the pod, when he spoke of black holes and event horizons and light bending while time slowed--

It was happening right now. That time-slowing thing.

Not for all of them. Not for Mace or Trey or Pilot. Just for Capa and

"Cassie," he said-- Capa said-- in that damned flat quiet android voice of his.

He'd spoken to Mace, the lying bastard had, of how they should behave toward Cassidy, should she for some reason-- after all, she wasn't family, was she?-- show up at the base. Propriety. Polite distance. Gracious formality.

All of which shattered now like a cinderblock through the window at Mace's back in the brunt of a full-facial-and-frontal collision between their Cassie and her Brainiac. Not the most graceful of embraces or the tidiest of kisses, to put it mildly-- at least one lip got nicked, and later they might have to ask the base medics to determine whose tonsils were whose-- but as Cassie stood there, after that first tenderly-- if dangerously-- messy kiss, wrapped in Capa's wiry arms, her head against Capa's bony shoulder, all Mace could think was _That's how these things are supposed to work. About fucking time._

"You owe me five bucks," he said to Trey.

"Sorry: I left my wallet in my other pants."

"Dick." Mace grinned-- and then Cassie was looking his way, over Capa's shoulder. Her dark eyes were bright with tears; Mace, heading over, said: "Hey, Cass. Got any left for us?"

Capa, smiling, breathless, released her; Cassie flew into Mace, and he swept her up in his arms, clean off her feet.

"Mace." She stood there, breathing against him, looking up at his face. She reached up tentatively and touched his scarred left cheek, just below his eye patch. "How--?"

"Doesn't matter." He smiled at her. "The new one's gonna have x-ray vision."

A throat-clearing, a voice behind them: "In the meantime, maybe the lady would like to acknowledge the token Asian."

"Trey--" Cassie said.

Trey grinned broadly and received his hug. Then he asked Cassie: "Could I borrow five dollars?"

"What?" She looked at him bemusedly. "Why--?"

Mace caught Capa's eye. "'Cause he bet me you wouldn't get more than a handshake out of Brainiac, that's why."

* * *

Actually, they had two and a half more visitors. The half was a proxy of sorts, incorporeal. Shortly after Cassie's initial mauling in the visitors' lounge, Mace's father called from the moon, from Tranquility Base, to offer his formal congratulations on the success of Project Icarus. And to tell his son that he loved him.

* * *

Later, as Cassie's first day among them turned into evening, Mace caught her and Capa outside the dining room almost managing not to touch each other even as they almost managed not to gaze into each other's eyes-- _Brainiac, you hypocritical little shit_-- and said, managing absolutely to keep his face straight: "Don't be getting up to anything, you two. There are cameras in our rooms."

"I knew that," Capa replied evenly. His expression said otherwise. So did Cassie's.

* * *

"You are an evil man," Whitby said.

It was becoming easier to think of her as "Whitby." As "Loinnir," too. Mace lay beside her, nakedly and sweatily exhausted beneath their shared sheet, smiling dreamily up at the ceiling. "I know. Means he'll be sneaking over to the guest quarters tonight, is all."

"You know he won't."

"So they don't get any tonight. They'll survive. Leaves 'em more for later."

"Are you so certain there _aren't_ cameras in these rooms?"

"Nope."

"Bastard."

Mace chuckled, rolled onto his side, kissed her. "Like you care."

* * *

Later that morning, their last visitor: Whitby's older brother.

He was a rangy, tall Scot with wild pepper-and-salt hair. Mace was there with Whitby when her brother Richard-- Richie-- arrived; there, Mace heard something that he knew he wasn't meant to hear, something that would haunt him in the coming days--

Whitby walked into a bearlike embrace from her brother the wildman. Then Richard Whitby stood with his forehead tipped to his sister's and asked gently: "Did you find him?"

"I did, Richie."

"Didn't go well, I take it."

"No."

"I am sorry, Annalee."

She swallowed. She started to say something, stopped. They stood for a moment, holding each other, not moving. Richard Whitby kissed his sister's forehead, again drew her close, rubbed her back. She closed her eyes and rested her head against his shoulder. Just as Mace was thinking he'd be more tactfully placed anywhere else on the base, she looked his way, tenderly and then just a touch wryly, and said: "Richie, this is Mace."


	11. Chapter 11

Cassie's last day among them came sooner than Mace would have liked, given what he'd done to screw up the first night she might have had with Capa. Two mornings after that first night she was back in the visitors' lounge, her duffel packed, saying her goodbyes before she headed out. She was to be flying the _Daedalus_ to the moon in three days; she needed to stop home first, and a vehicle from the motor pool was coming to take her to LAX for the afternoon jump-flight to San Diego.

She and Capa were standing at the windows, their arms loosely around each other's waists, watching the early morning sunlight chase lingering pockets of dusk across the desert floor. Whitby and Rosa had shown up, too, to see her off, as had Mace, who kept himself out of the way.

"I've been here almost three days," Cassie said. "And you haven't asked me why I left."

Capa tipped his head until his hair was just barely touching hers. "I didn't know if I had the right."

She smiled, a little wonderingly, a little sadly. She slipped her hand around his, squeezed, released. Then she dug in her duffel. A wallet inside. She unfolded it, took out a picture, and handed it to him.

Capa went very still. From the photo, a toddler was looking back at him. Brown dark curly hair, dimples around a baby's laughing smile. Eyes ethereally blue.

"His name is Charles. Charlie. He's staying with his nanny and his grandma." Cassie's face brightened as she spoke. "He'll be two and a half in July."

"He looks like you," Capa said softly.

"He has his father's eyes."

Capa took a step back, staring at her. Cassie looked back at him evenly.

"I wanted something of you to survive," she said. "Not your research. Not your work. Something of _you_. I don't expect anything from you. You've already given him the world-- I couldn't ask for anything more than that. But if-- someday, if you could meet him, that would be nice. He's a good boy. I think you'd like him."

Capa passed fingertips over the face in the photo. Then he held the picture out to Cassie. She gently pushed his hand away, back toward him.

"Welcome home, Robert." She leaned up, pressed her lips to the corner of his mouth. Capa turned his face toward hers, and their kiss was tender and longing and sad. They didn't close their eyes. When their lips parted, Cassie stepped back.

"Take care," she said to him.

Then she slung the strap of her duffel over her shoulder and walked out. Mace forgot to tell her goodbye.

* * *

Rosa looked at Pilot and said, "Why are the smart ones always so bloody stupid?"

Capa heard; he turned from the window and looked at her sharply. Rosa met her brother's shock-blue eyes with eyes just as shockingly intense in deep brown. "Robert, what do you think you're doing--?"

Capa knew-- Mace could see that-- he looked past Rosa and Whitby to the door of the lounge, where Cassie had gone and was no longer. And he hesitated--

Rosa went to him. She gestured at the door. "Go on. Go after her, Robert."

"I have responsibilities here--"

Mace said: "You saved the world, Brainiac. Think that's a golden ticket out of 'responsibility' right there."

Capa glanced at him, smiling slightly. Then he looked back at his sister. Rosa caressed his cheek.

"You came back. That'll do for now."

"I love you," Capa said.

"Love you, too," she said back. "Now go."

* * *

He was going. He took a dozen steps with intention and purpose, life behind him, more life than that ahead. But after those dozen steps, just outside the door of the lounge, he paused.

Whitby was there. Pilot. Noticing her, moments later, Capa wondered how much of his hesitation she had shared.

She walked up to him, stood close, and said: "An observation, Dr. Capa: Captain Pinbacker never got to know his son."

Capa stared at her. Pilot looked back at him with her sea-storm eyes, calmly. Then she smiled.

"Go after her."

And Capa ran after Cassie, the way she had gone, toward the front entrance, the doors leading out into a fresh clear desert morning.

* * *

If Mace had ceased to exist that morning, if he had blinked out when he passed from Capa's sight and consciousness, he never knew it. He stood a week later on a clear warm morning much like the one on which Capa had started his new life on Earth, outside the main entrance of the Icarus Project's main building at Edwards, sunning himself against the building's sandstone exterior. A car stopped in front of him. He tipped his head away from the wall, opened his good eye, looked.

Richard Whitby, from the driver's seat of a red Jeep, called to him roguishly:

"Our Miss Whitby's not asking-- in case you haven't noticed, she's quite shy-- but would you like to go for a ride, Mr. Mace? We're off to Los Angeles to fetch my nephew from the airport."

His nephew, Pilot's boy. Peter Whitby, ten years old. His mother smiled at Mace from the Jeep's passenger seat and said: "Climb aboard, Lieutenant."

Mace grinned. "Yes, ma'am."

He pushed away from the wall. He swung himself into the back seat of the Jeep. And off they drove, away from the base, toward L.A., under the strong hot desert sun.

**THE END**


End file.
